Timothy Polashek – Wood And Wire

The fact that Timothy Polashek has lived with moderate hearing loss (and the need to wear hearing aids) has actually had an impact on his compositional aesthetic; prompting him to explore the world of nonsensical speech sounds as music, as well as pitch and timbre manipulations of other sounds in his electro-acoustical works. He wrote his first computer program in the 5th grade to generate time-based graphic animations and by the time he entered high school he had written a computer program in PASCAL that could synthesize musical tones, generate improvisations in blues style, and display them as musical notation in real-time during the computation and reading of the music. As he writes, "all of the compositions on this album were composed recently, with the oldest, Porcupine Quest, dating from 2002...when I was composing these works, I knew that Eric Huebner might perform them so I kept his incredible virtuosity and spirited piano technique in mind...also, I am appreciative of pianist Steven Beck's superb playing on the duets, both in concert and in the recording sessions...overall, aesthetically, I view these works as modern classical music, but spoken at times in the dialect and emotion of jazz."