these dream these rheme these stream by Penkrot

Much of my music is concerned with the transition between recognizable ideas. This piece is a large-scale exploration of transition. Sonic spaces of high and low density, high and low range, and high and low volume each flow from one to the next. Much like the title, the impression is of tuning into and out of a chain of freely associated ideas, notably connected by their proximity and their phonic similarities. If said out loud, the second word of the three pairs can be thought of as a glimpse of a word in transition.

The concepts of “dream,” “rheme,” and “stream” are also connected to the performance of this piece: changes evolve as though in a stream of consciousness; performed in the dark, the listening environment emulates a dream-space in which structural continuity becomes less important to comprehension. Acting against its meaning is “rheme,” which is the linguistic term to define the substantive discourse on a topic. The word is purely transitional in the performance of the title once stripped of its semantic definition, promoting the idea that sound and music do not need to have meaning in order to be meaningful.

This premiere was recorded on 3/24/2016 at Northern Illinois University.