Portfolio

Christopher Douthitt is Lecturer in Electronic Music at Washington University in St Louis.

CV // Music // Teaching // Dissertation // Research // Other

To download a CV, click here.

To view a complete list of works, click here.

Select pieces below.

Glyptic Channels (2019) 36 min. composition-installation

Voices and Apparitions (2016) 7 min. soprano and electronics

We Move Through Sinking (2022) 7 min. voice and multichannel electronics

Foal in the Sunlight (2021) 4 min. vocal sextet

ESQUE (2016) 8 min. string quartet

Volute & Twining (2018) 9 min. two quarter-tone pianos

Cf. (2018) 6 min. piano and percussion

That Is a Field Folded (2017) 11 min. string quartet

Polyptych (2020) 15 min. three songs from a larger cycle in progress

The Glyphs EP (2015) 23 min. five songs

From Another Way (2014) 14 min. music for dance

Mirror Travel/Obsidian (2014) 11 min. two flutes and live electronics

Glyptic Channels (2019) — 36 min.

A composition-installation for two trombones, organ, laptop ensemble, fixed media, and cathedral. Designed for and installed in the Princeton University Chapel through a collaboration with Facilities, the Music Department, and the Office of Religious Life. Written for and performed by a fourteen-person mixed ensemble: RAGE Thormbones, Eric Plutz, and the Princeton University Laptop Orchestra.

The audience moves freely about the space. First-person field recordings of walking through the woods are punctuated by time-warped trombone samples, close recordings of fingers on a bass drum, and phonemes arranged in semi-sung gestures. The live instruments articulate a long process of harmonic clarification from free-frequency microtonality to the vertical extension of a single fundamental F. The trombones move from the balcony to the rafters, coaxing “non-musical” elements out fo the soundscape and into the musical present.

Each member of the laptop ensemble plays a Metall’Ocean. “Glyptic Channels” has been reimagined and restaged at the Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, TX (as “Glyptic Channels II” with the Mood Illusion) and as an interactive installation at the Outhaus in Los Angeles (as “Glyptic Gardens”).

View score.

Voices and Apparitions (2016) — 7 min.

A poem-song for soprano and fixed multichannel playback. Written for Rosie K. 

This piece was written for the New Jersey Composers Guild's Milton Babbitt Centenary concert. Babbitt's "Vision and Prayer" is a soprano-and-electronics setting of Dylan Thomas's shape-poem. I was intrigued by the way a concrete poem—determined by the diamond-and-hourglass shaped stanzas—could be translated into sound. I wrote my own diamond-and-hourglass-shaped poem in response, thinking about how Babbitt's music idealizes the quantification of sound-experience, but the phenomenon of listening to it highlights all that can't be quantified, like an irrational number overspilling with decimals. 

I sampled Rosie’s speak-singing voice, then created a fixed media track that explodes the consonants of the text over a ribbon of continuous vowels. Rosie's performance, which moves from speech to song and back again, is timed to loosely coincide these electronic versions of herself.

"Voices and Apparitions" can be presented as a live voice-and-electronics performance or as a multichannel fixed media piece. It has been presented at the Underwolf Festival (Los Angeles), National Sawdust (New York), and the SEAMUS 2020 conference (Charlottesville, VA and online).

Voices and Apparitions

text by Christopher Douthitt

No

Omened

Or neume-pierced

Veil, no fossils

Scattered thin across

Sunken fields, nor pitchblende-

Hidden ore, nor greenish glow

In foggy glass; no secret scrawl.

To know would be — weighted terms — to know

Past proving grounds, past atoms split,

But the sure pull of numbers

On the thing, which is there

And not, clear as air,

Unencumbered:

A closed all

Opened

On.

Apparitions in the optic nerve,

Like wreckage on sunlit waters,

Elude the earnest plotters

Of spasmed event: surge

Buckshot through blancmange!

Starlings, converge!

That such traps

Don’t snap,

See

Unfixed

Erratic

Beast-things springing

From any nested whole.

So, sudden data singing:

The floor of frozen faces

Concatenates - no, imbricates! -

Inert input - splash! - a dozen vases.

View score.

We Move Through Sinking (2022) — 7 min.

“We Move Through Sinking” is an art song intended for immersive multichannel playback. The images in the lyrics come from my experience of early spring in the mountains of Western Massachusetts, when young ferns peek through mud and frost. The world swallows us even as we break free. 

The song follows a slowly ascending chord progression that grows dissonant as it unfurls. The melody is framed by two new digital instruments that transform the voice-and-piano paradigm of the traditional art song, Snyderphonics’s Vocodec and Many Arrows Music’s bitKlavier. Elements of each instrument are broken across the multichannel space, so listeners can move to the sounds that draw them in.

We Move Through Sinking

text by Christopher Douthitt

Feathers graze the lips

Antlers choke the tongue

We punched a hole through ice crystal fog

Sponge crystals spike the lung

The sun slacks

The moon zigs and zags

In bent light

We move we move we move

Moth split your iris

Fling mirrors to the sky

The flash of ultraviolet wings

Splash halo flares off the punctured lens

The air coils, the torso tangles and yet

We move we move and yet

We move through sinking

We move we move and yet

We move as though sinking

We move we move and yet

We move as though through sinking

As though we move though through sinking

We move even as though through sinking

We move

View score.

Foal in the Sunlight (2021) — 4 min.

For vocal sextet. Written for Variant 6.

The text was inspired by a year I spent living on a horse ranch in Bastrop, Texas, a place unruly with life. Something was always being born overnight. The collaboration with Variant 6 was entirely remote, and the music ended up as a celebration of the simple fact of being alive and able to sing.

Foal in the Sunlight

text by Christopher Douthitt

Foal in the sunlight

All eyes crawling to you

Spread your wings in burning dew

I’m clasping the clod

That set you loose

That broke the cloud

That keeps collapsing on

The heap of you

Foal in the muscle-slick of moonlight

All eyes flashing in recoil

Ocean foaming from the soil

Foal, floating feather

Flung from the flesh of the femur

I’m clasping the clod

That set you loose

That broke the cloud

That keeps collapsing on

The heap of you

View score.

ESQUE (2016) — 8 min.

For string quartet. Originally written for the Escher Quartet and revised substantially for JACK.

The raw materials that constitute ESQUE come from a variety of sources: sketchbooks from other projects, transcriptions of since-lost field recordings, and a few half-finished experiments with pitch collections. In setting these scraps against each other, I kept returning to a quasi-lyrical argument between chittering persistence, lopsided repetition, and stabs of interrupting silence.

View score.

Volute & Twining (2018) — 9 min.

An ultrachromatic sound field for two pianos a quarter-tone apart. Written for HOCKET.

An exploration of Ivan Wyschnegradksy's "non-octaviant spaces," which replace the circle of perfect fifths with a circle of six-and-a-half semitone "minor fifths." A series of ultrachromatic interval cycles overlap as ascending and descending Shepard's tones, with rhythmic knots and twists along the way. The result is a clashing, kaleidoscopic wheel of sound.

"Volute & Twining" is a reimagining of a section of "Voluta/Twine," a percussion quartet I wrote in 2016. 

View score.

Cf. (2018) — 6 min.

For piano and percussion. Written for Lisa Kaplan and Matthew Duvall of eighth blackbird.

Complex, semi-random harmonies and timbres clash against loping, semi-repetitive grooves. A tongue-tied voice, struggling to learn its lines, is continually deflected elsewhere.

View score.

That Is a Field Folded (2017) — 11 min.

For string quartet. Written for JACK.

Inspired by Robert Duncan's poem, "Often I Am Permitted to a Meadow," which envisions a an ever-opening field, both real and imaginary, where memory, language, and nature are continuously folded over.

The piece begins with a stable pitch "opening" into upper partials, then rupturing, finding solid ground, and ascending as a heterophonic canon. As the melody climbs, the just-intonation pitch field is altered by a sequence of changing fundamentals.

View score.

Polyptych (2020) — 15 min.

For voices, percussion, and electronics.

Polyptych is an ongoing song cycle about the future, from a loosely microscopic point of view. Each song starts as a slightly undisciplined sonnet. The songs are linked by thematic content, orchestration, and recurring bits of imagery.

Over the course of the project, the songs have been rearranged for live ensemble performance (voices + percussion), solo performance (voice + electronics), and fixed media playback (the recordings included here). Please note that the linked score reflects a triangulation of these versions, and should not be taken as a literal representation of the sounds in the recording.

View score.

the Glyphs EP (2015) — 23 min.

The Glyphs are an expeditionary rock quintet I formed in 2013 in Austin, Texas. Personnel include myself (voice, guitar), Todd Pruner (bass) Cass Roberts (voice, saxophone), Yamal Said (drums), and Mike St. Clair (brass, keyboards).

I wrote the five songs on this EP while living on a horse ranch about 45 minutes from town. To me, they evoke the surreal juxtapositions that define the environment of Central Texas: a highway strewn with junk, pastures resplendent with poisonous nettle, and skies occasionally overcome by swarms of migrating butterflies.

Since leaving Texas I've put together the Anaglyphs, a voice-percussion-percussion trio with me, Mark Eichenberger, and Mika Godbole. We play these songs plus material written specifically for the new group.

From Another Way (2014) — 14 min.

Live music for dance, scored for harp, violin, contrabass, percussion, and electronics. Commissioned by dancer and choreographer Jiaxin Guo. Written for Stephan Haluska, Dylan Neely, Sam Hertz, Jesse Austin, and Christopher Douthitt.

"From Another Way" was written to mostly pre-existing choreography. I matched tempos for each section and created a fixed media piece, primarily using processed contact mic samples, which could scaffold the acoustic instruments. The percussion serves as a bridge between electronic and acoustic sound worlds: tuned flowerpots and PVC pipes fall just sharp or flat of equal temperament, linking the harmonic world of the harp and strings to the timbral world of the soundscape.

View score.

Mirror Travel / Obsidian (2014) — 11 min.

Materials and improvisation scaffolding for two amplified flutes and live processing. Written in close collaboration with Adriana Rueda and Erika Oba, with engineering help from Jesse Austin.

View score.

Washington University in St Louis

Music 1313: Digital Audio and Multitracking

Music 3313: Interactivity and DSP - Laptop Music

Music 401: Synth Lab

Music 402: Studio Songwriting

Princeton University

PLOrk: Princeton Laptop Orchestra (electronic music performance ensemble) as Interim Director, 2020-21

ATL 499: Spatial Audio as Teaching Fellow with Laurie Anderson and Arto Lindsay, Fall 2019

MUS 345: Songs and Songwriting as Co-Instructor with Dan Trueman, Spring 2018

PLOrk: Princeton Laptop Orchestra (electronic music performance ensemble) as Associate Director with Jeff Snyder, 2018-19

MUS 206: Tonal Syntax as Preceptor with Steve Mackey, Spring 2018

MUS 105: Music Theory through Performance and Composition as Preceptor with Juri Seo, Fall 2017

MUS/COS 315: Symbolic Music Computing as Preceptor with Dmitri Tymoczko, Spring 2017

Mills College

MUS 224: Contemporary Instrumentation and Orchestration as Teaching Assistant with Roscoe Mitchell, Spring 2015

Northwestern University

MUS 126: First-Year Aural Skills as Instructor under Susan Piagentini, Fall-Winter-Spring 2007-08

Senses of Songness / Scott Walker’s Avant-Garde Idiom

My dissertation is a split creative/analytical project that explores boundary states of song experience. “Song” is assumed to be a set of qualities that music can inhabit or express rather than a formal mold it can be made to fill.

The creative half of the project is a portfolio of songs, near-songs, and lyric environments that invoke——perhaps intermittently, perhaps tangentially——some unusual sense of songness.

The analytical half, “Scott Walker’s Avant-Garde Idiom and the Composition of Perceptual Space,” examines how Walker’s late songs manipulate multilayered virtual environments, deploying studio techniques alongside traditional song materials, to frame and reframe the space of listening as a compositional parameter in its own right.

I presented an excerpt of this analytical study at the national Society for Music Theory conference in November 2019 (see below).

Scott Walker’s Avant-Garde Idiom and the Composition of Perceptual Space

Paper presented at the Society for Music Theory Annual Meeting, November 2019.

Click here for slides, a handout, and other presentation materials.

New Digital Instruments

I build software instruments, mostly for use in my own music. Click here to learn more.

Click here to download beta versions of the Metall’Ocean and the ioiDrifter. Note that these versions are not designed to be user-friendly! I am working to develop public versions.

Dimensions of Sensitivity in Harmonic Perception

I am a contributor and sometimes co-author to a study conducted by Prof. Charles Chubb in the UC Irvine Department of Cognitive Science. Click here to learn more.

Underwolf Records

From 2017-2020 I was Co-Director of Underwolf Records. We produced, distributed, and promoted experimental music. In 2017 we published a translation of Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s long-unavailable Manual of Quarter-Tone Harmony. A translation of his late essay, “Ultrachromaticism and Non-Octaviant Spaces,” is underway. We operated a listening space in Los Angeles called the Outhaus, where we curated festivals of misunderheard music.

Music Theory Spectrum

From 2014-2020 I worked for Music Theory Spectrum as Journal Manager (under editors David Bernstein, Marianne Wheeldon, and Peter Smith) and as Editorial Assistant (under editor David Bernstein).