for 10 players, 2016, duration: 9 minutes
“Reading Basho” is composed for chamber ensemble of 10 players. The piece came about from the analysis of some recordings I made of a friend reading in Japanese several Haiku of Basho. The analysis was used to generate a pitch/texture collection of midi information to best approximate the sound of my friend’s voice as she read the Haiku. The midi information was much too dense to be of direct use so I used my composer intuitions to thin it out so as to make music of it. It is a multi-stage process and it is even hard for me to “hear” the original Haiku reading in the music that now makes up the piece. So it may be more correct to say that the Haiku sound inspired the music of the piece.