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Virtual Composition

by Steve Layton

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    ca. 3 hours and 20 minutes of music; track & liner notes, cover art included.
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  • Full Digital Discography

    72
    releases

    Get all 72 Steve Layton releases available on Bandcamp.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Eight Tracks, Peace, 68, Life Askew, ALT (Pop and Dance Hits), Stand Up, Music 1997 - 2001, No Mind, and 64 more. , and , .

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1.
Cry (1998) 05:06
2.
Apollon (1998) 04:26
3.
3 Melischromatica (1998) 07:07
4.
Samos (1998) 04:06
5.
Ouroboros (1999) 05:14
6.
Atalanta (1999) 04:48
7.
Ladder With Windows (2000) 04:35
8.
Every Sunset At Once (2001) 06:59
9.
Années Transcended (2001) 08:54
10.
Hum & Bristle (2001) 04:09
11.
Kleos (in memoriam Iannis Xenakis) (2001) 05:12
12.
The Spinning Room (2001) 07:41
13.
Strange Blossom (2001) 06:09
14.
Sad Clown (2001) 05:32
15.
When My Dream Was Near the Moon (2001) 04:56
16.
Ballet Blanc (2002) 07:32
17.
Postlude (2001) 04:29
18.
The Church of the World (2002) 07:15
19.
Shattered (2002) 07:16
20.
On the Great Longing (2002) 08:54
21.
Crossroads (2002) 04:22
22.
The Green Curtain (2003) 06:13
23.
Tyrant (2003) 05:50
24.
Almost the Periphery (2004) 08:47
25.
Why Apollinaire (2004) 10:47
26.
Eroica (2005) 15:22
27.
The King of Nothing (2010) 02:50
28.
Gevurah (2011) 03:23
29.
Ekphora (2011) 08:56
30.
Ripe Olive Sun (2012) 03:19
31.
Disturbance (2012) 07:44
32.
Ring of Bronze (2014) 03:05

about

As far back as high school I knew I wanted to be a composer; perhaps I should say I knew I would be a composer. With a lot of study, college, and university, that's just what I became. But I realized that I didn't want to stay within "the system" and teach, meaning that once outside that system of resources and support any performances would be very, very few, and very, very far between. Yet I didn't want to be writing works that only ended up in a drawer.

While live performances are a wonderful thing, I'm also a child of the age of recorded music. Relatively few people can hear any one performance, but a single recording can be heard by anyone in the world, any time, even long after my death.

Given those realities I decided I would mostly abandon score-writing, instead creating, realizing and recording all of my works by myself. I'd studied electronic music, electroacoustic music and synthesizers quite a bit back in school, so with the gradual availability of personal recording equipment and synthesizers, and the new MIDI instrument protocol, I began to be able to create fairly elaborate pieces, and fairly good recordings. The sound of these works of the 1980s and 90s was mostly electronically-oriented, playing keyboards and other devices to create all of the sounds.

In 1998 I bought my first PC, and with it my first complex music sequencing program. With it, I was suddenly able to quickly "write" music again in a way that very closely resembled to old days of pen on paper. Rather than going back to regular notes on a staff, I found it was just as easy to write the notes for each part in its own "piano roll" track. And not only could I escape the tyranny of the bar, beat, and even note subdivision, at the same moment as I was writing the piece I was also shaping a finished performance, one that could be committed to a recording as soon as the piece was done. All of this led to a kind of explosion over the next ten years, a flood of music from my fingers to the software to the recording.

None of these works were played using music keyboards; all of them were composed note-by-note in the sequencer. When the piece was finished being composed & written it was then recorded all in one moment, using either hardware or software synthesizers all passing through a single specific "hall" reverb. The pieces collected here are ones I consider "orchestral". Some are chamber-sized, to be sure, but most call for large to very large ensembles of instruments. The instrumental sounds are often realistic, but also often deliberately less so. If regular concert performance by real players is thought of as analogous to theater, what I do, and fully embrace, is more akin to film or animation. The instruments, the players, the hall maybe be unreal, but every note, sound, dynamic, attack, are completely real, created my own hand with my composer's knowledge of orchestration and performance practice. In some future time, if some other person wanted to create actual full scores for live performances, the MIDI sequence scores are all still preserved and with a bit of effort could be wrestled into normal score format. But that isn't my concern. I simply wanted to get as much music as possible out of my head and preserved as SOUND, to keep it out of the drawer and perhaps find its way into the open ears of another.

Of course, all the time that I've been exploring this new form of classical composition, I've also continued creating countless other works in a more purely electroacoustic and electronic vein, and around 2010 a shift in equipment and interests led me to do more and more of that and less and less "orchestral" writing. Though I still "write" music in the sequencer every day, it's a complete unknown whether I'll again focus on these kinds of scores again. Whether I do or not doesn't really interest me. I'm not beholden to any one musical style or philosophy; I love and recognize the value of ALL music, both in the listening and in the making. In the meantime, I give you this rather vast collection, of a hundred different colors and a dozen different styles, so to live in my personal sonic world for a few hours.

Steve Layton / Seattle, WA / June 2018

credits

released June 2, 2018

All tracks composed, performed and recorded by Steve Layton (ASCAP).

Instruments and equipment: Voyetra Digital Orchestrator Pro; Alesis QSR, Alesis Midiverb 2, Adobe Audition, Propellerheads Reason.

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Steve Layton Seattle, Washington

Composer, performer, recordist, connector, facilitator. Editor of Sequenza21.com, a long-running website reporting on contemporary classical music.
Collaborator at ImprovFriday/Sound-In, a weekly web gathering of musicians from around the globe. NiwoSound is an umbrella for innovative art music / art sound. ... more

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