Product Overview
Composer's Notes
Though my training as a musician and a composer is firmly rooted in western art music, more specifically within an American collegiate environment, a lot of my inspiration and musical influences come from jazz. In Lyddimy, compositional influence came from one of my favorite jazz composers and theorists, George Russell. The Lydian Diminished Scale , in which all but one note of the pitch material is derived, comes directly out of Russell's theory, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization . Another inspiration for this piece are my close friends here at Arizona State University, Dr. Audrey Miller (of whom this piece was written for) and Dr. Kate Mackenzie. It was in spending time with them that the subject matter and the inspiration to write this piece of music culminated.
It is, however, the theme of the composition that ties the entire piece together. Though it is literally woven into the fabric of this piece, and relatively easy to point out, in listening, and even in analyzing the piece, it would be difficult for one to discover the theme, much less find all of the nuances that unfold. It's pretty easy to see the word “Lyddimy” is partially derived from the name of the scale being used: the LYD ian DIM inished scale. However, you might also notice that Lyddimy bares resemblance to another word from the english language of a sexually explicit nature. Lyddimy is designed first and foremost as a mirror image of cultures that are comprised of very sexual human beings, yet have obscured the idea of sex or even the mentioning of the word (through miseducation and/or the misuse of religion) in a manner that is confusing and misleading to the community at large.
