Gregory Carl Pfeiffer - Spore

Notes:

Spore is a quick, quirky, energetic piece for Bb Clarinet and Percussion (6 hand drums). Although my educational background is in music, my current occupation happens to be in the mold inspection business. As a general rule, I have always kept my non-musical professional activities separate from my musical ones. An obvious outcome of this occupation is that I happen to spend a considerable amount of my time thinking about mold spores, their behavior and how they interact with various structures. However in attempting to visualize the strange microscopic world of these creatures I found myself inspired to compose a piece about them. For those that know, spores are not in themselves an organism but rather a seed, a unicellular reproductive unit that behaves like an airborne vehicle to enable mold to spread and find new possible locations of viability. Their world is our world but due to scale its as though we exist in two completely different types of reality.

Tuning information:

Quarter tones

Composer bio:

As a stylistically diverse composer of orchestral, chamber, solo, and electronic music, Greg Pfeiffer's works range from unapologetically tonal to unforgivingly atonal. Many of his recent pieces derive their pitch material from an originally devised system that applies binary code to vary the outcomes of fixed interval sets. His works have been performed throughout the United States and internationally including performances at the June in Buffalo festival, the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, and by groups such as the Boston Microtonal Society, ThingNY, The Curiosity Cabinet and the Contemporary Chamber Players of Stony Brook University.