This piece was created on a computer, during a period extending from January through August of 2004. It is the fourth piece which I have created using a compositional technique which consists of constructing music out of fragments of preexisting material.

This piece uses as its source material voice recordings of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. All of the sound in the piece is created directly from this source material. The Cheney material was derived from two United Press Club speeches, and the Rumsfeld material came from two press conferences and part of the congressional hearings on Iraqi prisoner abuse. The two press conferences were conducted during the war in Iraq. The first one took place just at the fall of Baghdad and the other shortly thereafter.

I recorded all of this material into a computer, and then went through it, carefully extracting fragments, which I thought could be musically useful for the piece I wanted to create. This process of harvesting musically useful fragments was quite time consuming, and was actually compositionally significant. A great many aesthetic and editorial decisions were made during this phase of the compositional process. For example, I would often decide to sample a particular fragment because I knew it would work in an interesting way with another fragment I had already sampled earlier. As I got further and further into this harvesting process, I started to find myself looking for more and more specific types of things that I knew would work well with my growing body of fragments. Sometimes I would be surprised by something I came across, and this would send me off in whole new directions of other new material to search for. But in the end, this pallet of fragments had built into it, a significant amount of aesthetic coherence, which served as a musically useful limiting factor. This helped to provide the final piece with a kind of unity, before the actual musical construction even began.

Once the fragment harvesting was complete, I could start building the piece. This was done on a Macintosh computer using a software program called Digital Performer. In this environment I was able to place, edit, combine, distort, multiply, signal process, stretch, shrink, slice, dice and generally manipulate the fragments to form my composition. The compositional style is a kind of highly linear through-composition. I’m striving to avoid self-conscious formalism in favor of following the rule of “what sounds good next”. It’s an attempt to capture my own instinctive improvisa-tional impulses. It is in fact a kind of slowed down improvisation. I started by creating the opening seconds of the piece. Once I was satisfied with how that sounded, I listened for what I thought should follow immediately thereafter. Once I had that in place and I was happy with how it sounded, I listened through from the beginning and tried to feel what should come next. I tried to think in terms of, “if I were improvising, what would be the next thing that I would do,” or more simply, “what sounds good next”. I followed this ethos strictly all the way through the composition of the piece. Whatever structure, aesthetic unity and/or coherent linear through-line one might perceive, is simply that which came naturally by following this compositional method.

That’s not to say I didn’t go back and refine earlier sections once I had moved further into the piece. I certainly did a lot of that. I even went back and added a whole section to the beginning of the piece, once I had reached the end, but the basic goal of creating something that just plain sounded right to me from moment to moment was still adhered to, and this process of revision and refinement was just a way of more fully realizing this end.

Funding for this project has been provided in part by grants from the McKnight Foundation and the American Composer Forum.