‘This is high adventure avant garde music of the best sort.’
- Gapplegate Classical-Modern Review
Willful Devices is a collaboration between composer/computer musician Scott Miller and performer/improviser Pat O’Keefe. The duo’s name refers to the fact that both musicians are manipulating devices, be it a clarinet or a computer, in order to generate sonic material. Anyone who works with computers or musical instruments knows that despite your best efforts, these devices are never fully under your control, and seem to have a mind of their own. Scott and Pat accept this fact, and even celebrate it, because within this unpredictability lies the potential for unimagined sonic discoveries.
Willful Devices is a collaborative endeavor in the truest sense of the word. Much of the development of their music takes place during that unique time we all know as play. The results are vital, dynamic, and sincere, a product of the connection between Scott and Pat and their unique musical identities.
Scott and Pat’s musical relationship began in 2003 when Scott was commissioned by the new music ensemble Zeitgeist (of which Pat is a member) to create an evening-length work, Shape Shifting. One of the pieces developed for that program was Mirror Inside, for solo bass clarinet with digital processing. In the midst of that collaboration their personal and artistic sensibilities clicked, and they began the journey that would lead to what is today Willful Devices.
Chimeric Night
Chimeric Night explores simple, quiet gestures that resonate within an illusory sonic landscape.
Lovely Little Monster
Lovely Little Monster is full of energy, at once physically uncoordinated yet beautifully graceful. Straining to be heard, yet frustrated by attempts to articulate complex thoughts, the physical gesture is found to be the most direct
means of communication. Ultimately, peace.
Arcata (#2 and #3)
This is an improvisatory work that can take many surprising sonic twists and turns depending on the intersection of seemingly minor decisions made by Scott, Pat, and the computer. For years we thought we could predict (and therefore control) the outcomes of working with this particularly precocious bit of programming, but ultimately we have come to accept and embrace its beautifully chaotic nature. Scott makes decisions, Pat makes decisions, Kyma makes decisions. There are consequences.
Ventriloquist
Ventriloquist examines the sonic potential which follows the step-by-step construction of a device that gives voice to musical possibilities. This version is an electro-acoustic “re-imagining” of Pat’s solo clarinet piece Indigenous Ventriloquist, composed in 1995.
Omaggio a 1961
Scott is a big fan of the electroacoustic sound world of the early 1960s. The timbral and contrapuntal results of this performance environment piece are reminiscent of that period—especially some works by Luciano Berio—hence the Italian title.
Lattice XVIIb
It’s big, it’s loud, and is just a lot of fun to perform. A free-for-all jam piece titled in honor of the many cryptic, formula-style titles for lack of anything truly meaningful to call it. It turns out that working titles, especially humorous, vapid or embarrassing ones, have a way of sticking.
Consortium
Consortium was inspired by the intersection of the ancient forms of canon and isorhythm with the more modern forms of sample looping and phase-shifting. The piece utilizes pre-recorded fragments of viol consort melodies by the English Renaissance composers William Byrd and John Jenkins (one recorded on clarinet, the other on cello, performed by cellist Jacqueline Ultan), which are combined to create several independent canons. These canons then become the foundation for a live, improvised clarinet performance that implements this same idea of looping and shifting.
haiku, interrupted
haiku, interrupted is an exploration of five restrained—yet powerful—gestures carried away by the environment they have themselves created, in the absence of other stimuli.