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Michael Winter's work often explores simple processes where dynamic systems, situations, and settings are realized in a variety of ways from performances to installations. Winter's work has been presented at venues and festivals throughout the world such as REDCAT, in Los Angeles; the Ostrava Festival of New Music in the Czech Republic; Tsonami Arte Sonoro Festival in Valparaiso, Chile; the Huddersfield New Music Festival in the United Kingdom; and Umbral Sesiones at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Oaxaca, Mexico. Recordings of Winter's music have been released by Another Timbre, New World Records, Edition Wandelweiser, Bahn Mi Verlag, Tsonami Records, and Pogus Productions.
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2CD
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XI 148CD
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XI Records announce the release of a double-CD set of Michael Winter's music organized by guitarist Elliot Simpson. Each CD features a single composition, demonstrating different sides of Winter's work.
The first, "Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut", is a socially-engaged piece written for Simpson and in honor of George Floyd. The second, a lot of tiles (trivial scan), derives music from a set of mathematical tilings (often referred to as tessellations). The album art features reprints of altered and counterfeit colonial Connecticut bills as well as custom-made, hand-stamped prints of the tilings. "Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut" interleaves guitar passages with readings of excerpts from the book of the same title written by Kenneth Scott and published by the American Numismatic Society in 1957. Readings from the Scott Compendium are complemented with readings of texts written by Winter reflecting events that occurred during the composition of the piece; particularly the protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, a black man brutally murdered by police while being arrested for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill. Simpson is accompanied by Gemma Tripiana Muñoz on piccolo and the texts are read by Simpson, Winter, and animator Mandy Toderian.
"a lot of tiles (trivial scan)" is based on a set of rectangle substitution tilings explored by Chaim Goodman-Strauss in his seminal paper "Lots of aperiodic sets of tiles". A rectangle substitution tiling is generated by dissecting a rectangle into four smaller rectangles, which are then dissected into eight even smaller rectangles, and so on. The parenthetical in the title, "trivial scan", refers to the method of sonification. Sonic parameters of the music are determined by scanning and reading the tilings. The piece is quite open. As Simpson explains about Winter's music in the notes: "Although his music covers a wide range of forms, formats, and concerns, there seems to always be a careful consideration of the adaptability of his works... They can expand and contract to accommodate diverse instrumentations, durations, spaces, and situations... There is an understanding that the myriad of possibilities defined by the scores will never be exhausted; new constellations of materials, performers, and contexts will always exist." In the recording of "a lot of tiles (trivial scan)", this variability is explored through different combinations of electronic, synthesized, and acoustic sounds featuring Simpson and saxophonist Omar López, the dedicatee of the work.
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CD
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NW 80798CD
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"The immersive sonic textures that characterize Michael Winter's (b. 1980) music are crafted from comprehensive lists of data, with each composition encompassing a musical question that is addressed algorithmically. A performance lasts for as long as it takes to 'answer' the question, expressing all results as efficiently as possible. Winter leaves room for unanticipated results by keeping things open, notably in the instrumentation, which, rather than specifying instruments, tends to designate certain properties such as 'plucked strings," or 'sustaining instruments.' In this way, each performance offers a different manifestation of the same underlying structure. For Winter, beauty is the experience of something new, and to experience something new is to evolve. Even though he allows for a great many possibilities, the recordings here evince a highly tuned aesthetic filter. All of the five works included in this collection use plucked string instruments (guitar, virginal, and harp) and pure tones (ebowed guitar and pure tones). Together, they form a metacomposition, bound together by two versions of necklaces. The titles describe the processes that form each work: necklaces represents picking patterns with aperiodic necklaces (strings of data with specific constraints of rotational and symbolic permutation), and in mass and band a constraint akin to a band pass filter is applied to an Ockeghem mass. Likewise, in chorale and finely tuned resonators, instruments resonate the harmonics of a chorale, and quieting rooms makes use of phase cancellation to quiet a room. The title of the piece lower limit refers to Winter's intention to use the smallest amount of code possible -- in other words, to find the lower limit for programming a composition. This idea, in fact, applies to all of the pieces here, since all are concerned with how to express ideas in a maximally efficient way."
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