Pachyderm
$10.00 US
Shawn Onsgard
Audio CD (2006)
Track List:
1. Solo April 1998 (excerpt)
2. Spinning Dance (excerpt)
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Liner Notes:
Solo - April 1998. performed by Shawn Onsgard
Pachyderm documents a period of my music composed while living in New Mexico (1995-1999) that pursued ecstatic and transcendental experiences. In my solo work of this time, I sought a mindful emptiness free of thought while attentive to perception. This proved to be a very productive strategy, and satisfying too. I remember on several occasions playing solos on the University of New Mexico student union piano at night after everyone but the custodial staff had left the building. Building to a frenzy of clusters and melodic streams I would howl a Rage le Vivre as the sound echoed through the building's empty volume. It was fun and life-affirming play. Through these solo piano works I came to know myself rather than transcend the 'self' as I'd intended. This recording was made near the conclusion of my solo efforts in this direction and marks the peak of some four years of improvisational development from 1994-1998.
Spinning Dance. performed by Neely Bruce, David Hanlon & Shawn Onsgard
One of four movements in a larger work intended to accompany meditative practice, the harmonic structure of this piece follows an augmented triad transposing again and again across the cycle of fifths. Borrowing from color theorist Johannes Itten's use of symmetric shapes imposed on a twelve hue color wheel to demonstrate complete harmonies, Spinning Dance can be described as an equilateral triangle spinning counter clockwise around a circle of twelve equal-tempered tones. As the specific means for articulating this movement becomes progressively less and less strictly prescribed, the performers introduce unintentional 'errors' that move the ensemble into less balanced but more expressive harmonies.
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