Clayton Simmons Davidson

‘Recordé haber leído que el mejor lugar para ocultar una hoja es un bosque.’ [I remember having read that the best place to hide a leaf is a forest.] - “El libro de arena”, Jorge Luis Borges At the end of the Borges short story “El libro de arena” (The Book of Sand), the narrator intentionally loses the eponymous book among 900,000 others in the National Library. “Chatter of Leaves” came from imagining this book with infinite pages there in the library, loose at night to exercise it’s boundless energy.

Metal Fatigue is a fixed media, acousmatic piece created using recordings of various types of metallic objects both small and large, as well as motors and other mechanical sounds. A combination of field recordings and close-recorded samples comprise the raw sonic materials used in the work. It is an exploration of the sounds of mechanical stresses as they break down more and more, and the different interactions into which those changes can develop, be entrained, or be transmuted.

Venom Thief is a fixed media, acousmatic, imagined soundscape. The idea for this piece comes from a sea creature with the scientific name Glaucus atlanticus. It is a variety of shell-less mollusk which is pelagic (it floats on the ocean surface, carried by the winds and currents), and has various poetic nicknames such as the sea swallow, blue angel, blue glaucus and blue dragon. Atlanticus feeds on other larger pelagic creatures like the Portuguese man o' war, being immune to their venom. It can move toward prey using the thin feather-like "fingers" on its body (cerata) to make slow swimming movements, then consume the entire organism, storing the venom for its own use. Concentrating the captured venom, Atlanticus produces a sting more deadly than the Man o' War it feeds upon.

Deluge is the fifth movement in a cycle of extractable works inspired by various categories of natural disasters. It is written for septet (clarinet in B-flat, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, violin, double bass, percussion) with computer. This is a through-composed piece in which the concept of the form is inspired by hydrological disasters such as flooding and sea level rise. The acousmatic portion of the composition uses hydrophone recordings as well as audio of snow, ice, and icebergs as compositional material. It traces the path of arctic pack ice from formation, through its slow descent to the ocean, calving into icebergs, and then becoming part of the sea and contributing to sea level rise. Spectral analysis of these sounds provided the harmonic material for the instrumental ensemble. Performed 04/28/19 at the Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theater at UNT - Kathleen Crabtree (violin), Luke Ellard (clarinet), Alex Meaux (bassoon), Nick Bolchoz (percussion), Walter Trapp (trumpet), Jordan Stone (trombone) and Jonathon Piccolo (double bass) and Garrison Gerard (conductor).

Gleaning is a composition for trio and computer which is the fourth movement in a cycle of extractable works inspired by natural disasters. After a geological disaster like an earthquake or landslide it seems that our inclination is to quickly reconstruct what has been lost, to recapture some sense of normalcy, gleaning what we can from the rubble. This movement is organized around that cycle of domesticity interrupted by disaster, rebuilding, and then yet another disaster. The instrumentalists start each of the three sections of the piece, without the computer, by slowly coming together and constructing a sound world. Each time they are then interrupted (without warning) by audio samples consisting of various sounds of destruction and geological events, which are played back and modulated by a Max/MSP patch on the computer. Performed 04/28/19 at the Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theater at UNT - Kathleen Crabtree (violin), Nick Bolchoz (percussion) and Walter Trapp (trumpet).

Synoptic Interference is the third movement in a cycle of extractable works each inspired by categories of natural disasters, in this case meteorological disasters. This piece is for a quintet made up of violin, clarinet, bassoon, trombone and double bass. Atmospheric Rossby waves are a type of inertial wave in the middle and upper troposphere that creates large-scale meanders in the air pressure systems of the earth, creating our seasonal weather patterns. Rossby wave sizes are measured by meteorologists using the synoptic scale (also known as the cyclonic scale) length of more than 1000 km horizontally. There are typically four to six Rossby waves circling each hemisphere of the globe, though the number varies seasonally. The increased amount of sunlight being absorbed by the northern hemisphere in summers means more energy in the air pressure systems that needs to find equilibrium. The erratic local action of these pressure systems build up energy and can form hurricanes, tornados, hailstorms, haboobs and all the other weather events depending on the larger seasonal conditions within which they occur. Performed 04/28/19 at the Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theater at UNT - Kathleen Crabtree (violin), Luke Ellard (clarinet), Alex Meaux (bassoon), Jordan Stone (trombone), Jonathon Piccolo (double bass) and Garrison Gerard (conductor).

Perturbations is a composition for double bass and computer which is the second movement in a cycle of extractable works inspired by categories of natural disasters, in this case extra-planetary events such as solar flares and meteors. The disturbances and eccentricities from the normal course of an orbit which are cause by outside forces are called perturbations. In this piece, the bass plays against a drone to which the computer is adding unexpected gestures and interjections. The gestures in both the bass and computer parts are all abstracted from sonifications of various magnetospheric events including solar flares, lightning whistlers, bow wave shocks, and auroral kilometric radiation (AKR). The pitch material is derived from the Schumann resonance spectrum of the Earth. Performed 04/28/19 in the Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theater at UNT - Jonathon Piccolo (double bass).

Into the Black is a composition for septet which is the first movement in a cycle of extractable works each inspired by categories of natural disasters. The idea for this piece and the title are taken from a wildland firefighting survival technique called retreating “into the black”. When a crew is fighting a wildfire and is on the fire front, sometimes during a flare up of the blaze they have to move from outside the fire line to inside an already-burned area, because it is the safest place to be. Over the course of the piece, pairings of the instrumentalist emerge from the septet and form a trio with the percussionist, each eventually merging back into the ensemble. Performed 04/28/19 at the Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theater at UNT - Kathleen Crabtree (violin), Luke Ellard (clarinet), Alex Meaux (bassoon), Nick Bolchoz (percussion), Walter Trapp (trumpet), Jordan Stone (trombone), Jonathon Piccolo (double bass) and Garrison Gerard (conductor).

This is an indeterminate work for two pitched instruments which uses Annette Vande Gorne’s ideas on the categories of energy models as improvisational cues for the different sections.

premiered by the UNCSA nu ensemble on April 15, 2016. Arranged for chamber orchestra with 3 percussionists and a MAX/MSP computer patch.