Composer’s Note:

Coupling was first developed at the Spatial Music Workshop, hosted by the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology at Virginia Tech’s Cube, in Blacksburg, VA. It was written for pianist Shannon Wettstein Sadler and percussionist Terry Vermillion as a complementary work for Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte, a seminal work of spatial music for piano, percussion, and 4-channel tape. In Coupling, the movement of individual sounds and their synthesis (and therefore our perception of their timbre) is coupled to the behavior of sound in the performance space using ecosystemic programming.