Five Card Draw, for one or more players
Video features Thom Monks (percussion) and Michael Malis (piano)
Premiered at Strange Beautiful Music XII, September 2019.
Five Card Draw uses a deck of playing cards as its score. The players work their way through the deck, alternating between fixed and improvisational roles.
I’ve used playing cards often to generate pre-compositional material for various compositions of mine, drawing rhythms, pitches, and form from their numerical and spiritual properties. But Five Card Draw is the first time that I've used cards as the score itself. Often, standard musical notation can act as a buffer between performers and the music they create. But by distancing musical notation from the performance of the piece, Five Card Draw forces the performers to more directly embody the musical processes at play. In this way, Five Card Draw puts forth a basic premise: that a musical composition can be made with anything; even a deck of cards, found in a kitchen drawer.
Rather than outlining specific notes and rhythms, the instructions for Five Card Draw outline a procedure which musicians should follow. These instructions lay out the rules for how the piece works, but leave the interpretation of those rules up to the performing musicians. The rules can be adapted and modified to fit the ensemble, which may be different from performance to performance.
The deck of cards are separated into two stacks: number cards and face cards. Rhythms are derived from number cards according to the process laid out in the score, and players of pitched instruments have the option of using those rhythms in conjunction with predetermined pitch sets.
The face cards are used to divine improvisational inspiration, using the cards' tarot analogues as creative sparks. The players work through the deck, alternating between fixed and improvisational roles.