Program Notes
As with so many of my pieces, the title came first. Eight Dudes is a play on "études", suggesting a collection of short pieces that engage the virtuosity of both the performer and the composer. I already knew that eight movements were required - and up sprang eight further puns on my initial play-on-words, eight evocative movement titles from which the music grew. These "dudes" are études and also character pieces, a lineup of exaggerated moods and personalities that sprang from the same source. The movements are unified by closely related four-note pitch sets, but the main impetus for the work was dramatic and conceptual. Throughout is an exploration of duality and binary conflict on many levels, from the duet for soloist and themself in A Tune to the quick-draw showdown in High Noon to the contrast of a movement with no notes (Point Moot) to one with as many notes as possible (The Move). This set of pieces is intended to be performed as a whole, with the movements in the specified order, but certain movements may stand up well on their own. Eight Dudes is not specifically a theatre piece, but it may be performed with as much theatrical staging and imagination as the performer desires. At the premiere, for example, the soloist wore the fedora used as a hat mute in Dark Moon when it was not in use. I have found that the use of five different instruments in the course of eight short movements is theatrical in and of itself! Performers may substitute different trumpets for the ones specified if necessary, as long as the original keys are respected and the work retains a wide variation in tone colour. Eight Dudes was composed in Edmonton during my degree at the University of Alberta, and was included in my Master's defence portfolio.

Program Notes
Lyre was commissioned by David Fallis and the Toronto Chamber Choir for their concert in the Metamorphosis Festival in Toronto in May 2005. The theme of the festival was Ovid's Metamorphoses; the TCC chose to put together a concert of music inspired by the myth of Orpheus. Rather than using an existing text, ancient or otherwise, my approach to this piece was to create a world of closely related phonic sounds. I began by deriving a list of "rhymes" (some of which are rather stretched) to the word for Orpheus' instrument, the lyre. I found that some of these words fell quite naturally together, creating images and stories that are sometimes mythological, and sometimes mundane. I don't expect the audience to hear the words, however: they are subtext rather than text, a private storyline for the choir to sing about when really, what the audience hears is a stream of related syllables. For this reason, I request in the score that the text not be printed in the program. As for composing the music, I let the text-stories speak to me as I played around a scale that is somewhat octatonic and sounds "ancient" to me. The piece is framed by a choral imitation of a strummed instrument: the Lyre of the title.

Program Notes
Commissioned for the Sir Alexander Mackenzie School choir, St.Albert Alberta.

Program Notes
Rainbow was born of the composer's desire to find a musical metaphor for natural light phenomena, particularly the spectrum of visible light observed in rainbows. The premise of the text is that the spectrum of phonetic sounds in human speech - particularly vowel phonemes - provides an appropriate mapping of the colour spectrum into sound. The exploration of sonic spatialization in this work is inspired by the (illusory) vastness and (often incomplete) symmetry of rainbows.

Program Notes
Reiteration is a piece about reiteration, and “reiteration” has two meanings (sort-of): Repetition and Recursion. The two contexts in which you might (might) use this word, that matter to this piece, are: Rhetorical: repeating what you are saying (sometimes with variations), in such a case that repeating it will strengthen your argument - instead of just making it redundant. Mathematical: An “iterated” (recursive) function is a function which is composed with itself, ad in?nitum, in a process called iteration. A really simple example would be 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2... forever. An example in this piece of music is the way intervals, lengths of notes etc. grow by adding one semitone, one eighth-beat, again and again and again... though not forever. (A “reiterated” function would be, I guess, an iterated function times itself, which probably couldn’t exist in our dimension). Everything in the piece is governed by that same simple principle: add one unit to the interval; add one unit to the beat. Then take them away one by one, then start again. In various ways, this is how everything was composed: melodies, harmonies, rhythms, even the overall structure. But really: who cares? Reiteration isn’t music by numbers - it’s quirky, fun and has a lot of rhythmic drive. The tunes are catchy. It turns out that when you create harmonies by additive intervals, you get Hollywood. And when I went back to revise the piece before the premiere, I changed the number of bars in my supposedly mathematically perfect structure: and the piece is better for it! It’s the imperfections that make music beautiful... (notes by Alex Eddington, April 2009)

Program Notes
Notes by Alex Eddington, September 2009: The text is not mine – nor anyone’s; it was delivered as a spam email, with the subject heading "Scintillator". Spammers use software that strings together sentence fragments from online Public Domain texts, as a way of getting past email spam filters. This software is sort of like an computerized John Cage, strolling on an e-beach, picking up seashell avatars without any interest in order or context. And sometimes, the result is striking. My approach as a composer was first to make my own guesses as to what text-strings come from the same source (Bhishma, Bahlika, Vena etc. made it clear that this is the case), and where the material changes. I treated some words as pivots between sources, which is actually how the spam-creation software sometimes works, whereas other changes are instantaneous. Then I worked instinctively, treating each text fragment with full compositional seriousness, only consciously connecting my musical material when I had decided that two texts shared an origin. The shifts between material frequently evoke a radio dial being suddenly switched – although this radio only plays solo vocal music (with some imagined accompaniments). My setting contains some humour, certainly, but ultimately Scintillator is a mystical piece. The text is the voice of The Internet: sublimely random, beautifully infinite. I imagine the singer as a random medium for all possible music, and this is what she happens to channel in the few minutes that we are listening. Scintillator is dedicated to Kristin Mueller-Heaslip, the commissioner, who gave the premiere on her tour concert as winner of the 2008 Eckhardt-Gramatté competition...and who continues to send me treasures from her junk mail.

Program Notes
While 'Three Conjoined Trifles' is basically one simple journey through one simple series of notes and intervals, there are many detours along the way. The pace of travel varies enormously. Some sections of road are repeated seemingly endlessly - and others become the fodder for overanalytical navel-gazing. But eventually we reach a sort of vista where all the distance we have travelled is laid out behind us, and our destination looks an awful lot like where we started - only flipped around. Each 'trifle' combines the bassoon and piano in a different configuration. In the first, they play in near-unison; in the second, they are indifferent to each other; and in the third, a traditional struggle between soloist and accompanist ensues. This is very much a collaborative piece - but the last word (and the first) belongs to the bassoon. Commissioned by Catherine Carignan and premiered by Carignan with Allie Cortens, piano: Victoria BC, April 27 2008.