Will Stackpole

COMPOSER | EDUCATOR

portfolio of NOTABLE WORKS :

Echoes in the grain

Juilliard’s Center for Innovation in the Arts commissioned this work for a unique performance format: two ensembles, one in New York with a live audience and the other in Cremona, Italy performing together in real-time.

The initial expectation was for new works on this concert to use improvisatory or aleatoric techniques to work around the inherent delay of remote performance.

For my contribution, though, I sought a means of making this delay integral to the music. The solution was to use the delay of the relay system itself as the determining pulse for the performance and to also use it as a chain of delays that could act as an additional layer of music.

The music from the live quartet was captured and sent to Cremona where the second quartet heard this music on headphones. The signal’s trip took a length of time I treated as an eighth-note pulse. This signal was then amplified in a space in Cremona, captured on microphones again and sent back to New York, where it was heard in the headphones of the first quartet. The whole journey there and back took, on average, a little over one second. Along the way the signal picked up digital and ambient qualities of its route. Throughout the work it is used to keep the first quartet on track, but is also occasionally played over speakers in the hall, acting in canon with the musicians.

l’abîme

L’Abîme is a chamber symphony which depicts our planet’s rising sea levels due to climate change. It does this by directly engaging with material from Debussy’s La Mer in ever-more consuming ways. The piece begins with musical ideas and language indebted to this work, but in its second movement engages in sudden and direct quotation from La Mer. The final movement uses processed playback to add another amplified and distorted layer of musical content which threatens to drown out the live ensemble.

The piece is structured in 3 large movements separated by brief miniatures (titled Flow and Ebb). The 3 larger sections of the work, are also inspired by three paintings of Winslow Homer, which until recently were hanging as a tryptic at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each movement takes its form from a loose emulations of the contours in Homer’s cold and violent depiction of the New England shoreline.

The work was written for the debut album of Red Dog Ensemble, which I also engineered and produced. The ensemble recorded the album at Avaloch Farm in Boscawen, NH over the course of 10 days in 2019. Following these sessions I was also responsible for the remaining production and mixing for the album (Neon & Oak). It was released in 2023 by Lexicon Classics.

For this album we also commissioned three additional new works by emerging American composers.

fEED

***Winner of the ASCAP Foundation’s 2019 Rudolf Nissim Prize for conducted music

fEED is an orchestral work engaging with themes of technology’s role in our society, specifically that of social media and it’s negative impact on attention and social interaction.

The work utilizes unique formal structures and harmonic vocabulary to convey a sense of divided attention and unease. Two notable passages in the piece depict the sensation of “doom-scrolling” by employing an intricately arranged harmonic progression, simulating the auditory phenomenon known as a Shepard Tone (3:33 & 10:55).

The work also has an obligato part for drum set. It plays a prominent role throughout the work, helping depict the delineation between the real world and the digital.

Premiere performance at Juilliard’s Meredith Wilson Theater (and remotely from the Stauffer Academy in Cremona), March 2023

The piece utilizes excerpts of music that Claudio Monteverdi composed while living in Cremona. This distorted quotation is meant to engage with the idea of individual and cultural memory as being an unreliable source which can bend over time.

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Increment - performed June, 2022 by the American Composers Orchestra, with opening remarks from composer Will Stackpole

increment

Increment is a piece which acts as an experiential metaphor for the incremental dismantling of societal norms. Throughout the piece, half of the string section plays music that is purposefully disjunct from the other orchestral layers of the piece. This antagonistic layer is nearly imperceptible at first, growing in activity and volume only for brief moments spaced rather sparsely. As the piece continues, these interruptions become increasingly frequent, grating, and intense until finally an un-ignorable outburst explodes from the orchestral texture to drown out the rest of the material.

The piece was meant as a reflection on the political climate in 2019 and remains unfortunately relevant. It was first read and performed at the Aspen Music Festival, then received performances by the Juilliard Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall in New York in 2020, and the American Composers Orchestra at the Dimenna Center in New York in 2022.

Premiered : 2016 by Jeffrey Milarsky & the Juilliard Orchestra

Further information can be found here