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Four Poems Somewhat

from Foundations by Thom Blum

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about

Four Poems Somewhat (2000)
When I began composing in the early 1970s I found when working through compositional problems it was often helpful to take a walk outside, even if only for a few blocks in the neighborhood. I could then get just enough distraction along with some fresh air to solve the puzzle at hand. This was a remedy I used when composing what became "Four Poems Somewhat", a piece I worked on over the 1998-2000 era. The course I walked during that period was often to the top of Russian Hill, for a set on the Broadway steps overlooking San Francisco's North Beach, China Town, the Financial District and, on a clear night, giving a full view of the Oakland-Bay Bridge.

During those walks a few short haiku-like poems bubbled up, naturally and as effortlessly as breathing. And along with the poetry I often heard, in my mind's ear, sonic reflections or reverberations of the poems, again without much conscious effort. The poems and aural imaginings became the fodder for this composition. And while the poems inspired the audio they are not actually uttered anywhere within the music. And the music was not intended to be a literal or a linear interpretation of the poems. Instead the poetry inspired and infused the compositional process. The resulting piece is a tone poem. These are the four short poems that inspired it:

@0:00
old days, cafés
thoughts and smoke drift out the window
onto the streets b(e)low

@~3:40
big city glowing....
fingers of light poke through
billowing fog mist

@~6:00
bright day car
taped-up door window
bakes in the sun

@~8:45
a pin dropping sounds
shattering the silence that
cradles the sleeping drunk

"Four Poems Somewhat" is electroacoustic music, meaning in this case that it is composed of electronically-processed but acoustically-produced sounds. The raw materials include field recordings made during walks in San Francisco as well as purely computer-synthesized audio. The sounds were processed, mixed, and sequenced using a variety of software, including U&I Software's MetaSynth, Digidesign's ProTools, Cloud Generator (by Curtis Roads and Alberto de Campo), SoundMaker (by Alberto Ricci), and various signal processing algorithms made by Muscle Fish.

©+℗ 2000 Thom Blum (ASCAP)

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from Foundations, released January 2, 2021

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Thom Blum San Francisco, California

Thom Blum has been composing electroacoustic music since 1974.

Recent performances and installations include "[You Are [Here] You [Are] You Here]", a sound installation established in 2022 in the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, and "Telescopic 1 (zoom out)" at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2024. ... more

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