Turbulence for Bb clarinet, guitar and computer will be premiered by Ron Rudkin on clarinet and Alan Hirsh on guitar at the Music Carolina Summerfest concert on September 7th at the Piedmont Music Center in Winston Salem, North Carolina. I completed Turbulence for clarinet, guitar and computer this past April (2024) in response to an artist grant from the Winston Salem Arts Council. In composing this new work I sought to create a musical landscape for the musicians to move through in which the computer creates a flow of turbulence around the musicians path. At times the musicians join the turbulent flow and at other times they slow to a calm stasis in their quest to find equilibrium.

Also on the same program will be a performance of At a Crossroads for bassoon and computer by Stephanie Patterson. At a Crossroads was inspired by a passage in the novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, in which Marco Polo explains how the past changes the future:

“Marco enters a city; he see someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square.”

Third in a series of improvisatory compositions, At a Crossroads asks both the performer and computer to travel down a constantly evolving musical road, defining and redefining who they are and their relation to each other from one improvisatory moment to the next.