JOE CATALANO

As Oceans Curve: Toward the Nevada Desert

An hour length excerpt of a sound meditation incorporating both electronic and acoustic instruments.

Five Terrestrial Projections for Guitar and Other Instruments

Conceived as a set of five chamber pieces which highlight the guitar paired, variously, with cello, piano, harpsichord, harp, flute, recorder, and bass clarinet. The centerpiece in this set is a work for guitar alone. Commissioned by, and dedicated to, Jeffrey Noonan, Catalano has set out to extend the literature for the guitar and to embody in it the developments of pulse/pattern minimalist music. This set of five distinct pieces, each lasting from 20-30 minutes, exploits a different technique of minimalist musical language.

Each piece is composed on a single sheet of paper, 24" by 36," worked into a score of graphic notation. Each piece also has a different design based either on a graphic pattern or structure.

Because the scores are large in format, all works can be performed from one score, except Woodhenge, which needs, ideally, two copies for performance.

1. U3NFO2LDI5NG

A different kind of string trio, scored for guitar, cello and piano, this piece is based on the Fibbonicci number series found in the growth patterns of many trees, plants and animals. It is the working out, in sound, of these life patterns. Its effect has been described as possessing "a passionate quality which borders on the deeply tragic."

Item number CJ-S-4; Score $12

2. Between Friends

Set for guitar and flute, the score is formatted into two squares. The combination of the two parts is left to the performers' discretion though the instructions demand that they perform all the written material provided. It is very likely that no two performances will ever be the same because the possible combinations of the two sets of material (of nine units each) equal 362,880 different possibilities. The most striking aspect of this work is the inclusion of silence within a minimalist framework.

Item number CJ-S-6; Score $12

3. Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes

This composition for guitar, harpsichord, and optional recorder, is based on the musical material derived from a magic square of nine notes. The first section relies heavily on improvisation, while the second section is the rigorous working out of rhythms, from nine beats down to a single beat.

Item number CJ-S-2; Score $10.00

4. Woodhenge

Scored for guitar, bass clarinet, marimba, and harp, this piece takes its musical structure from the celestial siting rings found at the pre-Columbian archaeological dig at Cahokia Mounds in south-western Illinois, at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. This site contains the largest pre-Columbian structure north of Mexico City and, also, the remains of a Native American city which population of over 50,000 constituted one of the largest pre-European settlements in North America. This musical piece is a meditation of the uses of time as recorded at this site by the transit of the stars and planets overhead. (Recommend purchase of two copies for performance.)

Item number CJ-S-3; Score $12.00

5. DreamFrame, for guitar alone

This piece takes both its graphic and musical inspiration from Ptolemy's The Almagest, Nicolaus Copernicus' On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and Book Five of Johannes Kepler's The Harmonies of the World. Much of the graphic content of this broadside is a reworking of these three writers' celestial diagrams. Kepler really did believe in a "harmony of the spheres," Copernicus only partially worked out a correct celestial mechanics, and Ptolemy put the earth at the center of the universe. Each of these intellectual constructs was part of a dream world, a vision of a reality which had only a relative truth.

Item number CJ-S-5; Score $12

As Oceans Curve

Sounding the Deep Ocean Layer; Toward the Nevada Desert, and The Great Barrier Reef - a set of three scores from an ongoing series of pieces for group performance. Each piece is a meditation on different aspects of the physical and psychic nature of the world's oceans.

YesterDay ForeTold/Ayer PreSagio

Six of thirteen sections of a multi-lingual theater piece (English, Spanish, Nahuatl) based on the eight bad omens reported to have taken place in, and around, Mexico City ten years before Cortez landed in Mexico in 1519. The musical structure of this piece is based on the Meso-American Aztec/Mayan 52 year calendar. The text comes from the eyewitness accounts of the 16th century Mexicans who witnessed the conquest of Mexico. The piece premiered at the Teatro Mission in San Francisco. Each of the thirteen parts is a single sheet, 24" by 36". Scored for soprano, alto, narrator, marimba, harp, harpsichord, contrabass and electronics, and based on the San Francisco performance.

Listen Deeply Beauty Surrounds You

This piece was especially composed for the Tenth Anniversary celebration of Deep Listening Institute on May 27, 1995, with a map of Kingston, New York in the center with mandalas on each side

Item number CJ-S-7; Score $12

Magical Flight

Item number CJ-S-8; Score $12

Projected Music: A Geometry of Tone

A treatise on the grouping of musical tones into two and three dimensional matrices and geometric patterns. Many of these patterns have been used as structural underpinnings in a number of the author's compositions.

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