These Things Happen (or not), for marimba and electronics, is composed and dedicated to Jean Geoffroy in recognition of our collaboration that dates to before the pandemic and even back to the 1990's at IRCAM! The piece explores several scenarios that at times give room to the performer to make decisions and personalize the work. Jeremy Wagner at CNMAT designed a new system for displaying time called the Visual Metronome allowing for a variety of timekeeping and support for the performance. The composer built a large ensemble of sampled instruments that are controlled by the CNMAT TimeWarp object created by John MacCallum. This piece was originally commissioned in 2021 by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. I am providing here free use of the piece along with a fully functional performance MAX/MSP patch and score (see the downloads below).

The electronics for These Things Happen (or not) were created with my implementation of John MacCallum's TimeWarp object. TimeWarp allows for the shaping of dynamic tempomaps that allow for distinct and smoothly altering tempi to be composed across time. This is essentially a new way to compose time and I have been working these past years to find ways to map synthesis and samples to these tempomaps. What appears as a sort of plasma of sound in the electronics is actually carefully crafted. What I love about the situation is that I am able to scale the time to any frame such that a revision of particular phrase is very easy to achieve, even with complicated electronics.