Embark was composed for the marriage of Stacey Mastrian and Richard Bond in 2015. The 5-bell chime functions as the backbone and, in line with the practice of mindfulness meditation, focuses on a single action. This action, the striking of the chime, is ever-present and broadly unchanging. Over this, the egg shaker moves amongst three different performance modes, establishing a middle ground between the meditative bells and the more active kalimba. The kalimba plays melodic fragments with only tangential relationships to one another. Taken as a whole the three instruments represent three simultaneous ways of being present in the world.
Empirically derived: 204 Hz - G#3 29 cents flat 258 Hz - C4 27 cents flat 268 Hz - C4 44 cents sharp 318 Hz - D#4 36 cents sharp 331 Hz - E4 9 cents sharp 438 Hz - A4 9 cents flat 452 Hz - A4 45 cents sharp 620 Hz - D#5 5 cents flat 626 Hz - D#5 11 cents sharp
Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Stephen Lilly is a composer, performer, audio engineer, and sound artist. His music ranges from “just dark” and “so demanding on the listener” (The Retriever) to “really more ‘performance art’...the sort of thing you are very glad to have experienced without necessarily wanting to revisit it” (The Washington Post). Stephen has degrees from the University of Idaho (composition/bass performance: BM) and the University of Maryland (composition: MM, DMA). He also spent a year studying electroacoustic music at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague. Amateur poetics, theatricality, and satire are the trappings of much of his work, the majority of which are chamber works written for friends and friends of friends. His writings on contemporary experimental music have been published in Organised Sound, Performance Research, Perspectives of New Music, and Computer Music Journal. Recordings of his compositions are available from ink&coda, the SEAMUS Electroacoustic Miniatures Reco