nicholas
landrum

"Dum Sacrum Mysterium" was commissioned by and written for Jim Hopkins and All Saints Church, New York City.

"Hoc Corpus" was written for the Catholic Sacred Music Project in 2024, and premiered under the direction of Timothy McDonnell.

Eternal Light takes the beautiful meditative prayer of Alcuin of York and explores the images conjured by the text through the use of text painting and the interval of the perfect fifth. The prayer asks for deliverance, mercy, pity, and light in the darkness of our hearts. I used the perfect fifth, the most brilliant sounding and stable interval aside from the perfect octave, and used it as a building block for bright-sounding harmonies. The use of the fifth also creates heavy modal implications, causing a shift in the sonorities towards the final cadence.

The work is written for my friend and colleague, Josh Wang, and the choir of Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Golden Valley, MN. It is intended to be performable in a few rehearsals with minimal divisi. A situation that many church choir directors are all too familiar with.

But Thou O Lord takes was commissioned for the choir of historic Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia during my friend, colleague, and fellow composer, Luke Carlson’s tenure as interim director.

Psalm 124 was commissioned by Tenth Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia in 2012.

Throned Upon the Awful Tree (Arfon) arranged for TTBB choir and Organ.

This Kyrie is the earliest piece continuously in my catalog, and is in response to the loss of a life too young. The Kyrie pleads for mercy in a time of trouble and uncertainty. It was commissioned by Andrew Senn and the historic First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia for their Good Friday service in 2008.

The Blackest Black is a work that takes its title from a specialized pigment dubbed “Vantablack” that is, as it says, the blackest black pigment that has ever been created. The pigment absorbs so much light (99.96% of all the light that touches it) that the surface temperature can go up to 300°C. It is highly toxic, and is actually “grown” onto items in an antigravity chamber, and cannot be exported. Though originally interned for military use, the artist Anish Kapoor acquired exclusive rights to the pigment in 2016. In response to this monopoly on color, the artist Stuart Semple created a similar shade of black, dubbed “Black 2.0”, and released it cheaply to the public along with another color referred to as “Pinkest Pink” as well as “Diamond Dust”, a powder which claims to be the world’s most “glittery glitter”. All of these powders can be bought on the artist’s website with the caveat that the purchaser will in no way distribute the product to Anish Kapoor.

All of the sounds in the electronic accompaniment are created by synthesis in order to connect to the inhuman intensity of the pigments and their creation. In particular, I focused on two different sources for the synthesis, physical modeling synthesis (utilizing the model of a blown bottle), and a monophonic analog bass synthesizer by Moog that I recently acquired. The text is by my friend and collaborator, Alejandra Martinez, who was the first person to introduce me to the two artists.

"A Brightness and a Quickening" was written for my friend, baritone David Tahere, for his first recital on the faculty of Lee University in Cleveland, TN. The texts are by Ashley Seitz Kramer, a poet whom I’ve had the pleasure to work with over the years, and feature a consistent theme of brightness, introspection and poignant vernacular language. Though the language is simple, the message is potent and complex. The musical materials mirror these texts in their simplicity, potency and buoyancy in order to show the very sincere, but subtle message inherent in each poem. The sublime and often peculiar metaphors of each text provide a tantalizing palette of colors that are reflected in the music, allowing the composer and listener to simply move through the text in a series of images and emotions that are conjured by the poet.

“segment of a five-sided room” is a reworking and expansion of the violin and kick drum music in my “sketch of a five-sided room.” This work is still in progress.

"helices (and other heavenly bodies)” was commissioned by Principal Timpanist of the Minnesota Orchestra, Erich Rieppel, who wanted a piece that could be performed exclusively with the standard four timpani. The work uses rotating rhythmic patterns generated by a very cursory implementation of Euclidean geometry to create constantly evolving metric shifts and accents, as well as the gradual feeling of the work spinning out and growing organically. The “helices” referred to by the title the Helix Nebula and DNA, both of which have fascinated me in their graceful and hypnotic construction.

“slow flow” is a modular work for solo violin, and was commissioned for the Minnesota Orchestra’s Yoga and Wellness series. The work is intended to last between thirty and sixty minutes, and serves as a very guided improvisation, with different textures, key areas, and moods to fit a yoga workout, or to simply tell a tone story.

In this piece, I wanted to focus on humanizing the great machine that is the organ. The opening focuses on the use of very quiet stops in order to highlight the atmospheric effects of the instrument noise created by the keys and swell box. The pitch and harmonic materials are formed by deconstructing fragments of English choral anthems (mostly the perennial favorite, Howell’s “Like as the Hart”, but also with bits of Warlock’s “Bethlehem Down”, and Tallis’s “If Ye Love Me”) and meditating on them, rather than the traditional method of theme and variation.

My second work for solo cello, “East Coast Architecture” was written after starting my time at Cleveland Institute of Music. I was incredibly homesick, having left my native Philadelphia and surrounding area for the first time. This is my sad love letter to the East Coast, with fast rates of information scaffolded by the austere serenity of the monstrous grey buildings that make up the skyline. The work also serves as an homage to a major influence on me at the time, and another East Coast native, Elliot Carter, who had died shortly before I began composing the piece.
The work was commissioned by the Cleveland Institute of Music for Meghan Carey and premiered by her the same year. I thank her for her dedication to learning and performing this piece with such precision and mastery.
The work was also recorded on video by Justin Leopard for his cello+ series.

The Nunc Dimittis has often been one of my favorite texts in the liturgical canon. I’ve always been moved by its poignancy and sincerity. It serves as a final prayer as one prepares to leave this life, and move on towards whatever light awaits them. For for the past 18 years, I’ve always been employed in some way or form as a chorister or soloist at churches and have been steeped in the musical and liturgical traditions that made up much of my early artistic life.

I utilized a repeated bass pattern, or ostinato that begins to evolve and move towards brighter timbres to represent the ascension from the repeated labors of life, highlighting “…to be a light…” in order to really show the meaning behind the text, and its optimistic nature. Additionally, the violin serves as a guide, bringing direction to the repeated pattern in the organ.

Text:

"Apertures and Aggregates" is a work that focuses on the influences of great individuals (or concepts created by these individuals) in my life between 2015 and 2016. Each movement is titled in reference to a concept by a person that I’ve been introduced (or reintroduced) to, and is tangentially connected to that individual thinker or concept. Movements one and two are in reflection of a lecture by Noam Chomsky and his questioning of the inherent concepts in linguistics and by nature, science itself, an unfortunate influence as of late. The third movement reflects on two specific influences in my aesthetic identity: Elizabeth Streb, the celebrated modern dance choreographer, and the second is my past experiences as a punk rock musician. Streb’s routine, “little ease” is performed in an open front box that is just large enough for the performer to sit up or lie down. The routine, like most of her work, involves intense physical stamina and precision, as well as a healthy level of risk; even in the moments of grace, there is a perceivable amount of struggle that the dancer must endure. The punk rock aspects of this movement include the driving rhythm and gnarly timbres that fascinated me as a young musician. To pay homage to these two influences, I use dissonant counterpoint and a constant rhythmic ticking that shifts in order to create the feeling of unease that is felt in watching either type of performance, as well as bit of more free, indeterminate effects to replicate the raucous quasi-improvisatory nature inherent in both mediums. The fourth movement is written in dedication to my brother, who keeps me honest about all things logical and mathematically based. It utilizes a set of finite possibilities (just using natural harmonics and open strings,) as well as canonic processes in order to reflect on the concept of “Almost Surely” drawn from statistics as something that has high probability of occurrence.

My ambition in writing this piece was to write something that would be as fun as possible for the listener and the performers while still exploring some discreet processes inherent in my music. The materials come from my preoccupation with minimalism and the overlapping rates of information, with an overlay of my love of punk rock and electronic music. There are three primary motives, one harmonic, one rhythmic, and one melodic, that are explored through the five formal sections of the work, all of which are somehow based on the number five as a nod to the oddly shaped studio I occupied while writing the piece.

“Pincushion Diction” is a work that was written for the incredible loadbang ensemble to be performed at the Red Note Music Festival. The work is inspired by my obsession with the English language, “singer diction,” and new-music tropes.
When I was just a Freshman in college, I remember being blown away by how curiously everyone at Westminster Choir College seemed to speak, with good support and perfect, albeit overdone singers' diction. If you don’t know what this is, just imagine someone trying for a part in a very serious play, and simultaneously trying to take up all of the sonic space in a room. One of the upperclassmen in my studio seemed alright though, and helped play piano when I didn’t have a rehearsal pianist. Little did I know at the time, but that upperclassman wound up being the baritone for loadbang, Jeff Gavett.
The text is by the composer, and features words chosen for their consonants in a sort of New Music pattern song, a form most notably used in “I am the very model of a modern major general…”

In the early summer of 2003, the Mars Rovers Opportunity and Spirit were launched toward the red planet, with both landing in January of 2004. Their mission to explore the planet’s surface was to last 90 sols, or 92 earth days, reporting back with a variety of climate and geological data so that we might better understand our neighboring planet. The mission was a wild success, with both robots remaining operational well beyond the original three month mission. The Spirit rover lasted until May 25th of 2011, 20 times longer than expected, while Opportunity continued to roam the martian surface, winning the hearts of not only the NASA scientists that operated the rover, but also the public. The scientists even gave the prodigious robot the nickname “Oppy”, and had the rover sing Happy Birthday to itself every year.

Unfortunately, in 2018, tragedy struck when Oppy was caught in a planetary dust storm, and on June 10th, 2018 it sent one final message reading “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.” After they lost communication, NASA continued playing the rover popular songs as transmissions, attempting to revive it (“Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”, and “Life on Mars” being among my favorite selections). The final transmission from NASA, Billie Holiday’s famed rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You”, was sent on February 13th of 2019. The Mars Exploration Rovers are considered one of NASA’s most successful missions ever.

In writing L’enfant Terrible (with flashes of bright green), I wanted to examine what the rover’s final moments might have been like; the race for survival against the violence of the planetary dust storm, followed by the calm and quiet of the martian landscape. In order to develop a fitting sonic palette for the work, I created an array of electronic sounds from a very basic analog synthesizer, the physical modeling synthesis of a blown bottle, and source recording made available by NASA of Opportunity’s treads as it explored Mars. The analog synthesizer and the physical model synthesis are both slightly unpredictable in their generation of sound, with a slight hesitancy and warmth that create a more humanized representation of the rover. In addition to the synthesis and source materials from NASA, I used destructive editing techniques to create glitches and interruptions in the first movement, and granular delays and some spectral manipulation in the second to give them each their own character.

In the first movement, “Panic Motion”, the orchestration is bold and aggressive, using raucous brass gestures in the bass trombone and trumpet, as well as in the percussion, utilizing stereo bass and brake drums. The strings also use a variety of percussive techniques including snap pizzicato, col legno battuto, and a guitar pick on the viola. The music is turbulent, with a constantly shifting pedal tone moving from E up a quarter-tone and back repeatedly in the cello, creating a sense of unease as the ensemble interjects with violent gestures over the repeated rhythmic cells. As the tension builds, flurries of synthesizer and winds begin to become more and more frequent, creating further dissonance with the spiky percussion and constant ticking in the electronics and ensemble. As the interruptions increase the movement comes to a head, glitching the tempo forward, forcing the rhythmic gestures to fracture and splinter off in new directions. In the final moments, the synthesizer breaks off from the ensemble, unfurling raucous arpeggios that wind towards the percussive end.

For the second movement, I added my own brief requiem to the songs that were transmitted to Oppy. I decided to make it a sort of Lux Æterna (light eternal), one of the final movements of the requiem mass, and often one of the most lovely, especially in terms of text. The movement is slow-moving, with bright interjections of light in the violins, flute, and synthesizer. As the opening gambit is unfurled, pitches are slowly and methodically added to the initial open fifth sonority in the synthesizer, expanding until it’s pushed forward by the addition of constant pulsations in the vibraphone. The melodic material in this movement is spread between the quick flourishes in tight canon, and long, expansive lines in brass. The entirety of the harmony and form is governed by a few simple mathematical processes with clear formal divisions between the sections, while still giving the feeling of organic growth throughout the movement. As the harmonic and formal processes play out, the movement opens into the expansive sky above the rover in its final operational moments, until, despite its best efforts, it is lost to the cosmos.

Alinea, “¶” also known as the pilcrow or paragraph symbol represents the start of a new idea. This piece is a collection of orchestral ideas from my sketchbooks that had started to pile up since my first orchestral work, “Gaslight” in 2013. You can almost hear the pages being ripped between sections, as the orchestra goes through a sort of musical diary of gestures and timbres.
The work is inspired by the restaurant Alinea, whose chef, Grant Achatz, is an inspiration to me in my creative life. His ability to truly reach for the next idea, and to use his technique to accomplish the seemingly impossible inspired a lot of the orchestration in the work.
Alinea is the winner of the prestigious Dean’s Prize at Indiana University and was premiered by the University Orchestra under the direction of David Dzubay.

During my graduate studies, I became obsessed with the idea of utilizing vowels for their individual color profile or formants. Vox Humana is my first such attempt at “orchestrating” with vowel content based on analytical data, and utilizes samples of my friend, Carolyn Craig, singing the full spectrum of “frontal” vowels from the very bright, forward, and rich in higher partials [i] (or “ee”) to the placid, almost entirely fundamental [a] (or “ah.”) In using these colors in tandem with keyboard and percussion samples, I construct an organ (Carolyn’s primary instrument) with combinations of the individual vowel colors acting as stops, as well as letting the colors manifest themselves in different sections of the work, highlighting their unique sonic properties. The voice is also used in creating filtered reverbs in which you can hear the vowel shift, a process of analysis, and utilizing an impulse response of the analyzed sound.

Solo voice and piano arrangement of the tune "AR HYD Y NOS" with the text of "For the Fruit of All Creation," and also available with the text of "God that Madest Earth and Heaven."