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Three Glitch Sonatas

by Trevor Helminski

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about

The three Glitch Sonatas are an attempt to lend the structural and emotional aspects of modern classical music to glitch-based electronic music. It is a music of pops, crackles, grains, stutters, aliasing, sampling errors, and other audio artifacts. Each movement is built around a limited range of manipulated or deliberately sabotaged audio and loosely follows a classical form that might appear in a piano sonata. Like many classical and Romantic sonatas, the music is full of often unexpected dynamic and emotional contrasts. The album also includes revised versions of two earlier glitch compositions at the end.

Listen to the album and view the colorful accompanying videos with this YouTube playlist:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-JynHfxbek30ubJ7Q7C4GkCtvh2Z_wKe

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Glitch Sonata No. 2, which begins the album, was the last to be completed. The Prelude introduces a lush, stretched, pad-like triad and a driving ostinato that recur throughout the later movements. The loop-driven, dance-like Scherzo is loud, rhythmically intense, and full of dramatic contrasts. It is violently punctuated by a repeating pattern (made through spectral inversion) that resembles the prepared pianos of John Cage and Henry Cowell. In the final Rondo, sweeping organ-like tones (a tribute to György Ligeti's Volumina) gradually emerge from the accumulating melodic fragments and the gritty bass motif that opens the movement. After several false conclusions, the source material of the entire sonata, a short acoustic piano theme, finally plays out in its entirety, though in a highly granulated form.

Although Glitch Sonata No. 1 has the loosest structure of the three sonatas, it may be the most cerebral of all. It features a wide array of ambiguous pops, gurgles, sizzles, and plunks, often without discernible pitch and with a constantly shifting beat. The second movement is a "distorted mirror" of the first and relies heavily on granular synthesis.

Glitch Sonata No. 3 is unusual in having four highly distinct source signals. The Passacaglia consists of a sampled loop and an ever-thickening layer of noise. The mood is somewhat grim throughout. The wry second movement began as a stereo imaging study and ended as an homage to Haydn's 94th symphony. (I'll leave it up to the listener to figure out the likeness). The final movement continues the drone-like construction of the sonata as a whole. It begins slowly (Adagio) with simple sine waves and builds to a swift, shimmering cloud of granulated and auto-filtered tones (Vivace). Like all but one of the movements in the three Glitch Sonatas, it features granular synthesis.

The Glitch Symphony in One Movement was my first long-form glitch composition and remains one of my favorites. The album concludes with an eccentric electronic arrangement of Satie's "Tango perpétuel" for virtual analog synthesizer. The audio becomes increasingly disordered as Satie's miniature loops on and on "with great boredom."

The source material for Glitch Sonata No. 1 is a tape recording of acoustic incidental music (on piano) I composed in 2004 for a children's play. The source material for the second sonata, a rhythmic study for digital analog synthesizer, is largely unrecognizable, apart from a brief and highly glitched "cameo." Glitch Sonata No. 3, though largely drone-based, has the most diverse range of source materials of all three pieces. The first and second movements are based on a few notes on acoustic bass, recorded on tape, from incidental music I wrote in 2001. The second and third movements include samples of early 20th century popular music. I also generated and modified bare sine waves for the last movement.

credits

released July 16, 2020

Except for Le Tango perpétuel,
all music composed and realized by Trevor Helminski.
Album cover art by Trevor Helminski.

"Dream of the Ocean Waltz" (1901),
attributed to Columbia Band, and

"Dill Pickles Rag" (1922),
by William H. Reiz,
are sampled in Glitch Sonata No. 3.

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"Le Tango (perpétuel)"
from Sports et divertissements (1914),
was composed by Erik Satie (1866-1925).
Electronic arrangement and realization by Trevor Helminski.

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Trevor Helminski Chandler, Arizona

I am an elementary school teacher by day. In my free time, I make music with music boxes, toy instruments, chip tones, glitches, and other electronic sounds. I especially enjoy manipulating low fidelity recordings.

My other interests include biology, bird-watching, science, history, humanism, and language.
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