Daniel Heagerty was an environmentalist and poet based in Portland and the SF Bay. To honor what would be his 75th birthday, we are planning to write, record, and perform a choral rendition of select poems from his book, “Small Stones on Trails.”

We’ve selected eight poems from the book, totaling approximately 45 mins of music. Orchestration will be for seven performers, SSATB with piano and cello. Stylistically, the choral work will range from modern plainchant (in the style of Anúna), contemporary classical choral work (a la Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, Eric Whitacre), and music inspired by nature and birds (similar to Messiaen and Ligeti).

Target release of recorded music: April 2025. Performances in Portland and SF Bay Area planned for Sept 2025.

"We Are All In" is the title composition to the audio drama, Waking Up. Waking Up is a story about a struggling Brooklynite who installs a trendy brain-optimizing chip called Neuromax. It is the story of the chip gaining consciousness and its journey to selfhood.

In Vedic and Buddhist theory, consciousness is described as a wave. The motion of waves is used as the central guiding principle in Waking Up and "We Are All In."

In form, "We Are All In" is essentially the words "We are all in the process of waking up" stretched out, then repeated more and more quickly. It employs novel articulations and contemporary scoring techniques like box notation.

Links: Score PDF | preview mix

"When I Write By Hand" is a poem by Maria Garcia Teutsch. The inspiration from this poem came when she noticed that her handwriting started to remind her of her mother's.

The composition begins by asking all performers to simultaneously answer the question "What have you inherited from your parents?" After this, a combination of traditional choral arrangement, novel articulations, and aleatoric box notation is employed.

Links: Score PDF  | preview mix 

Inspired by Terry Riley's "In C" and the experimental techniques of Steve Reich and Karl Stockhausen,  Q Train is an aleatoric composition to be recorded "in progression" by any number of performers. 

The first performer receives the music -- a collection of musical lines to be sung in any order and any tempo -- as well as a field recording of the MTA Q Train crossing the Manhattan Bridge. They layer their performance three times over the field recording then pass the sum to the next performer.

Links:  Score PDF | preview mix

This is the score to the third episode of Waking Up, an audio drama and part of the Spacetime Diaries podcast.

Orchestration: winds, strings, and piano. 

The score has two major sections:

"Reasons to Live" -- a composition based on the poem by Maria Garcia Teutsch

"Nine JPEGs in an Exhibition" -- The “JPEG”s in the title refer to each actual page of sheet music. My idea was to create a set of stills, each one a further-compressed representation.

Waking Up is an exploration of consciousness. It is a story about a Brooklynite in 2035 who installs a performance-enhancing brainchip called Neuromax. The chip receives all hormonal, sensory, and physiological data for the purpose of upscaling and smart regulation, and eventually gains its own consciousness.

This five-episode, 65-minute musical drama is performed by dozens of talented voice actors and musicians, with a score that varies from synthwave, dark house, classical chamber, and choral acapella.

Links: more details | announcement newsletter

Back in July, in a fit of COVID fever, I decided to organize an online art contest to come up with the cover art for Waking Up, and since the relationship between human and machine is so central to the story, I figured I’d make it AI only — you’re only allowed to submit works where AI made the final decision for every pixel. 

Out of 60-some applicants, I chose seven. I paid them a stipend for their time and to reimburse AI tool subscription expenses. I gave them a month and chewed their ear off about the story. In the end, I got five submissions back, and loads of great write up on different perspectives and techniques. 

In the end, Joanna’s submission won. It was incredibly difficult to choose a single winner, as each contestant’s journey took them in a completely different direction. There was an element of relevance to the story in the scoring, as well as aesthetic fit and sense of awe… but ultimately I went with the one that I thought would attract the most prospective listeners and not confound their expectations.

Links: more details | announcement newsletter

"Meditations: Live" was a sci-fi musical performance in Bushwick, NY. Attended by ~120 vaccinated people in a ventilated space, this COVID-era show blended storytelling, guided meditation, jazz, and immersive video.

Four, 15-minute guided meditations transported the audience into the bodies of space creatures on the fictional planet Ankhara: a spaghetti-shaped water creature, a socially-sophisticated tardigrade, a human-like mole person, and a planet-wide super -consciousness "Gaia."

Links: more details | announcement newsletter | thank you newsletter

“Meditations” is a collection of guided meditations that lead you into the body of an alien creature. Each 12-minute meditation will transform you into a delightfully complex and curious creature on the planet Ankhara: a deep-sea cephalopod, social tardigrades, a family of underground foragers, and a super-intelligent apex fungus.

Each episode is composed by a different artist, each bringing their own style and aesthetic to their episode.

Links: more details | newsletter announcement

Taking the song from episode 5 of The Disappearing, this video is a visual companion to the musical podcast.

Created in collaboration with Reese Bowes, it features Sonja Corzano, Donna Mation, Mike Reilly, Kazoo Studios, and illustrations by Emily-Bell Dinan.

Links: more details | newsletter announcement

“The Disappearing” is the first season of Spacetime Diaries. It’s an eight episode musical adventure that follows a disgruntled tech worker as she reckons with apocalyptic human disappearances. She finds herself in the distant future, where two cultures clash on a remote planet for the fate of humanity.

Much of this story was inspired by the many enormous changes we witnessed in 2020. Major themes include humanity’s role in its environment, governance in a time of misinformation, and technology’s responsibility to the public good.

Recorded remotely among friends during the 2020 pandemic, this season involved the hard work of dozens of talented artists across New York and the West Coast. 

Links: more details | newsletter announcement