Compositions — priam david

A Bee In your Bonnet

For Saxophone Quartet

The main idea, in composing for a saxophone quartet, was to explore the homogenous and heterophonic sounds the ensemble could produce. When each saxophone is playing a note within its relative register, the timbres blend together. When they play within their respective higher or lower registers, they produce their own unique timbres. This idea is the basic compositional framework for a bee in your bonnet. The formal sections of the piece focus on the different timbral combinations of the saxophone quartet, with sounds varying from distinct to similar.

For 14 musicians and amplified mezzo-soprano

Crooked and Uncanny

On the surface, there are two people, one that we allow to showcase to the world, and the other that has to be forcefully hidden and scarred. The piece draws inspiration from the poem The Other Side of a Mirror by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge. The poem depicts a contradiction between the narrator, and the narrators’ reflection, which portrays an oppressed representation of the narrators’ true self. The piece goes back and forth between these two representations. The singer and her type of sound production attempts to reflect these two representations: beautiful melodic singing for the version of us the world has to see, and guttural, close and natural noise effects one can make with the mouth and throat to represent our hidden reflection.

Sonorités pour l’oreille douloureuse

For Solo Piano

This piece is approached through a more traditional method of piano composition; no playing inside of or preparing the piano in anyway. These limitations brought effective solutions to break up certain tediousness and sameness produced in the piano’s timbre. (1) A juxtaposition of contrasting materials; these embodied the form of idiomatic jazz harmonic techniques and 20th century post-tonal harmonic language. (2) Contrasts through the use of varying register. (3) The use of prolonged and shortened resonances.

the colour of dijon

For small ensemble

Instrumentation:

Flute, One Percussionist (5 woodblocks, 2 toms, Snare drum, Marimba, Bass drum), Guitar, Harp, Viola, Double Bass.

This odd instrumentation allowed me to explore various timbral combinations with each instrument fluctuating constantly between the foreground and background of the musical texture.

Front and centre

For Oboe and Percussion

This piece attempts to remove any form of a narrative arch. The piece flows linearly between contrasting sections without any regards to the established musical discourse that came before, and what will eventually be. The piece is a void where formal and harmonic development does not exist. There are only two compositional parameters that are used to create any coherence within the materials; a musical mode of fixed register that is shared among the two performers, and that each new tempo is of proportional tempi.

Give them hope

For saxophone and electronics

Give Them Hope seeks out to create a musical space in which historical LGBTQ+ voices exists. The way the voices interact with one another help create and foster a meaningful musical structure. These unique interactions allows the listener to perceive a shared communicative message between these voices that transcend the era in which they originally existed in. The role of the saxophone takes it upon themselves to embody a contemporary listener, where the music they play is often in tandem with their intellectual and empathic reinterpretation of the meanings of the voices, either from a semantic or purely acoustic perception.