Deep Blue Spiral

Hear an excerpt of this piece.

Composer: David Heuser
Instrumentation: Alto Saxophone and Tape
Year Composed: 1998
Duration: 7 minutes, 30 seconds
Pages: 17
Cost: Purchase: $45.00

Recordings:

• recorded by Jeremy Justeson, on the CD “Juggernaut” on the Equilibrium label (released May 2002)

Representative Performances:

• Thomas Walsh, saxophone, University of Indianapolis Contemporary Music Group, Indianapolis, Indiana (March 2006)
• Valerie Vidal, saxophone, AURA, the Moores School of Music Contemporary Ensemble, University of Houston (January and April 2004)
• Ken Marshall, saxophone, Trinity College of Music, London, England (March 2003)
• Aaron Heick, saxophone, Music at the Anthology Spring Festival, New York City, New York (May 2003)
• SEAMUS National Conference, Iowa City, Iowa, Patrick Jones, saxophone (April 2002)
• North American Saxophone Alliance Region 4 Conference, Jeremy Justeson, saxophone (March 2001)
• University of Texas at San Antonio, Morgan King, saxophone (February, 1999)

Performance by Morgan King (10/99) reviewed in the San Antonio Express News by Mike Greenburg:

"With its jazzy solo line seamlessly integrated with the crashing, nervous, streetwise, cop-show adrenaline rush of the tape part, Deep Blue Spiral wanted to be heard in a hip urban warehouse, not in the UTSA Recital Hall."

Deep Blue Spiral, for alto saxophone and tape, was written for the saxophonist Morgan King. Unlike most of my pieces, work on Deep Blue Spiral was spread out over a rather long time - more than a year. During much of that time I was not directly working on the piece, but, from time to time, I would return to it and begin to think about it again. Once work on the tape part really got underway in the studio during this past summer, things progressed fairly normally.

The tape part was realized at the University of Texas at San Antonio's Electronic Music Studio. The primary tools used were a K2000 Kurtzweil synthesizer, the Vision sequencer program, and Sound Edit for digital sound manipulation.