thread fork thread (2015)

for alto flute, tenor saxophone, viola, and percussion

commissioned by the Walden School and
composed for the International Contemporary Ensemble
Summer 2015

studio recording by Strains New Music Ensemble
February 2016

see full score (version for cello instead of viola)

For many months prior to writing thread fork thread, my focus was on electronic music, open-ended scores, and improvisation. I choose to use this project to return to the practice of a more straight-forward compositional process. Not only does the title reflect on the work's form, this piece feels like a forked thread in the flow of my work: “In multitasking operating systems, processes (running programs) need a way to create new processes, e.g. to run other programs. Fork and its variants are typically the only way of doing so in Unix-like systems. For a process to start the execution of a different program, it first forks to create a copy of itself. Then, the copy, called the "child process", calls the exec system call to overlay itself with the other program” (Wikipedia).