Eclipse was written at the electronic music studios of the California Institute of the Arts on the Buchla 200 Electric Music Box in the spring of 1976. It's been included as a bonus track on this album, although is not listed in the tunestack on the CD's outer traycard.

LINER NOTES:

Eclipse received it's premier at Cal Arts in a concert named 'What Goes Up, May Go Sideways" which was taken from a direct quote of Milton Babbit's, who had recently visited the school. I was able to schedule a meeting with him during his short tenure there and a photo was taken during that by one of the school's journalists. (click here to see the photo). You can see the work's score on the tabletop. Babitt was actually the first person to hear the work after it was completed. Later that year another notable Columbia visitor, composer Pril Smiley and I had a laugh over Eclipse in that we both had pieces by this name. I told her it was intentional on my part in the hopes the two pieces may get shuffled so people would hear hers and think it was mine. Pril and I still chuckle about that to this day...among other thngs.

The version you are hearing is a two channel mixdown of the original the four channel source.

TECHNICAL NOTES:

Most notable to this work is the fact that balance of it came from a single patch, a conept which was difficult for me to embrace initially which in time would become a technique I would rely on heavily. It remains a testiment of the sound that can be had from the Buchla fixed filter bank (he called it his Comb Filter), which was fit with separate non-attenuated outputs on each filter along with a summed output which relfected the mixture of all of the attenuator settings. The initial sound consists of one generation of a single oscillator whose frequency is being swept by a quantized random voltage and whose timbre is first routed though a high q Band Pass Filter which is being controlled by the same randomization and then to a large Fixed Filter Bank. Each of the ten outputs of that filter were taken and gated through their own VCA, each with it's own envelope shaping the sound, all of which had different, albeit short decay times. The pulse outputs of the 16 step sequencer were gating these envelopes and because of another Buchla feature are selected randomly .

The variations in this patch are timbal in nature and most of this comes from the separate filter outputs of the that fixed filter bank. Eciipse's coda exhibits a second adaptatoin of this patch, with the fixed filter bank replaced by two 292 Bandpass filters in series.

Performance Notes:

Eclipse was played on 15 occasions puboically. It premiered at CalArts iin 'What Goes Up, May Go Sideways' and later in 1977 was among the winners the Virginia Commonwealth University Electronic Music Festival. It was my second win at VCU. Other noteworthy performances were at the GMEB in France and the fifth annual Electronic Explorations concert at Brand Library, Los Angeles.