This piece is split into two movements.
- My sweet cat companion Alice Mae tells me she wants to make Thanksgiving dinner this year and whoa it’s delicious
- The tiny turkey ivory tickler Turzo entertains his family and friends with some experimental improvisation
The first movement samples various kitchen sounds and Alice Mae’s meows. She spends lots of time with me in the kitchen and the idea of her stuffing a Turkey was amusing to me. Like me, she would give up very quickly. What is more amusing to me is the idea of her effortlessly preparing Thanksgiving dinner, thus I wanted to play some calm keyboard melodies beneath the sampled sounds. This was improvised but the general affect of peace was always in mind. To prepare this piece, I recorded sounds on my iPhone, brought them into the studio, compressed and normalized them in Ocenaudio, and strategically placed them in a sampler.
The second movement was composed by 10-month-old Turzo who has begun enjoying himself at the piano. I was moved by his fascination with the sounds he could create and asked his mom if I could play and record and duet with Turzo. While that was the initial inspiration, as I played back the audio I recorded from my iPhone, I was most inspired by the sounds of people talking in the background. This sort of candid, familiar sound was a percept backdrop for the piece, and so I manipulated it with a highpass filter and reversing and layering to create a backdrop I was happy with. Three other layers made with software instruments are the square pad (of which I altered its cutoff the most), an arpeggiator (to liven the energy and brighten the sound), and a drum set. The top layer consists of three reversed piano regions played periodically at increasing volumes. The piano is obscured completely by the end of the piece before the intense texture dissolves. It is a happy intensity, one that resembles that joys of sharing a holiday with people you care about.