Piano,Tuba - Level 5 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1002836 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. Contemporary. Score and part. 33 pages. NoteForge #6113517. Published by NoteForge (A0.1002836). I spent New Year's Eve 2018 in Nye, Montana, visiting family and friends. One of those friends is an imaging specialist who regaled us with an explanation of his most recent project, which he described as calibrating the moon. Specifically, he was talking about the NASA ARCSTONE mission to calibrate the moon's reflectance to use as an accurate reference, primarily in climate science. The idea is that we have all this data about global warming and atmospheric changes, and a lot of that data uses the brightness of the moon as a control variable, but we don't actually have a precise definition of how bright the moon is. Ever since I was a part of that conversation, I knew that I wanted calibrating the moon as a title, and everything that came after that plays with the idea of moon themes or of doing big impossible-sounding things. When Connor Challey approached me about writing for tuba, Calibrating the Moon was an obvious choice.The work opens with Syzygy, a term describing the straight line between the sun, moon, and Earth that occurs every new and full moon. The movement starts dark and brooding, moves to an energetic middle section, and returns to being mysterious, kind of like a lunar cycle. Fun fact: This movement's theme is actually a tuba setting of the phrase Calibrating the moon.The Second movement, Spectral Reflectance, is slow and shiny. NDSU was fortunate to have portfolio tubist (and Connor's mentor) Sam Pilafian as a visiting guest artist for several years, and I finished Syzygy around the time of his passing. I spent a lot of time thinking about Sam while putting the second movement together, and I quoted a couple of his favorite tuba concerti.The work ends with Libration. If you were to watch a time-lapse video of a lunar cycle, you'd notice that the moon not only transitions from new to full to new, but also sort of oscillates or wags. That's Libration. The movement is likewise off-kilter, playing with the listener's sense of time through alternating time signatures.https://kylevanderburg.com/music/calibrating-the-moon/

Instrumental Duet Instrumental Duet,Soprano Saxophone,Synthesizer - Level 5 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1002828 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. Contemporary. Score and parts. 15 pages. NoteForge #3879889. Published by NoteForge (A0.1002828). MEMORANDUM: TO ALL PERFORMERS.Due to the recent increase in fiscal downgrowth, the composer must unfortunately expand cost-saving efforts to include an expansion of our downsizing endeavor. Staff members in positions that are not being phased out may experience alternative conditions of performance, including but not limited to: an increase in notational responsibility; expanded interactions with mechanical or automated co-performers; heavier reliance on benchmarking, and a decrease in overall compensation. It is the composer's aim that this proactive approach to talent management will stimulate our entrepreneurial spirit, thereby resolving our fiscal difficulties without any major adverse effects.Backing track/tape part available at https://kylevanderburg.com/files/document/D8E308F1-7ED9-4023-ADC2-7D72D009D66F/.

Instrumental Duet Finger Cymbals,Instrumental Duet - Level 3 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1002832 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. Contemporary. Score and parts. 5 pages. NoteForge #5319505. Published by NoteForge (A0.1002832). Ping & Peal is a piece for finger cymbals and tape that I wrote for Creativity November--an extended version of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) that I participate in with several friends from grad school. The rules are simple: Pick a creative project. Work starts on the first of November and must be completed by the third of December. Projects have to be started and finished within that time frame. Status updates are over doughnuts at 10 PM on Tuesday nights. Anyone who doesn't finish their project owes the rest of the participants a cake.I like to use this time to try out new tools and new techniques, and in 2018 I chose to play with some notational techniques I started using in Austerity. The tape part is notated in the sheet music much like it appears on computer--as a collection of waveforms showing volume across time. Both the live sounds and the pre-recorded sounds, with few exceptions, come from a pair of finger cymbals, which are struck together, dampened, scraped, and subjected to a number of digital manipulations. Backing track: https://kylevanderburg.com/files/document/74BD46EE-8D26-4211-87CA-A0D7968C56A5/

Instrumental Duet Clarinet,Instrumental Duet,Synthesizer - Level 5 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1002834 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. Contemporary. Score and parts. 11 pages. NoteForge #5319515. Published by NoteForge (A0.1002834). Crosswinds represents a melding of the traditional woodwind sound of the clarinet with digital live electronic techniques, and the piece explores the potential for this relationship in three parts.To begin the piece, the stage performer breathes through the clarinet, which serves to inform the electronic elements to come. This initial breath is captured by the computer program and is modified and reduplicated to create the sonic tone of a soft wind always present beneath the piece to come. This is the first step in uniting the digital and woodwind elements, as the same breath which animates the clarinet also activates the electronics.From this most fundamental element, the breath becomes a single sustained note from which the computer will generate all of its subsequent tones. The impression is one of a mentor relationship, where the traditional instrument provides the tools and the support for the electronic elements. The disposition is contemplative, though it alternates between a subdued easiness and a playful mystery, as if to introduce the digital aspects to the range and variety of the clarinet’s moods. The rapport between the two is hesitant in the first part: the electronics contributing a subtle reverb as the performer teaches the computer dexterity through a number of broad leaps, hinting at but never fully embracing the main motif.As the theme becomes more self-assured, the digital element now produces its own tones, parroting the clarinet melody to signal its readiness to be an equal partner in the conversation. As the clarinet begins the second part of the piece, the computer now provides a harmonizing undercurrent each time it is invited to do so by the performer.In the third part, the electronics play counterpoint to the skill of the clarinetist, the two elements intricately entwined. From the elemental sound of wind first produced by the performer and perpetuated by the computer, the piece concludes in a celebration of the relationship built between the two, and the main theme is fully expressed as the two take it in variations.Crosswinds is, in many ways, an experience of the history of our music through the relationship between traditional clarinet and modern digital techniques: the common elements they share, the singularity of their own particular strengths, and the beauty that can be experienced when they collaborate.Patch for live electronics available from https://bitbucket.org/kylevanderburg/crosswinds/downloads/

Woodwind Ensemble - Level 4 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1002839 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. Contemporary. 22 pages. NoteForge #6383305. Published by NoteForge (A0.1002839). I wrote Thaw during my third winter in Fargo, and it was an act of optimism, because spring hadn't hinted its arrival when I completed the piece. My intent was to provide a meditation on the nature of melting snow and the slow, steady revealing of things last seen in November. I thought of the piece as figurative as well, hinting at the defrosting of our preconceptions, our assumptions, and our expectations. In hindsight, it seems appropriate that this piece was written in 2020, a year in which has seen a thaw in a number of ways.

Piano,Soprano Saxophone - Level 5 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1094540 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. 20th Century,Classical,Contemporary. Score and part. 13 pages. NoteForge #698593. Published by NoteForge (A0.1094540). I’ve written pieces about daydreaming before—nostalgic, yearning reveries. This isn’t that kind of daydream. This is the sort of overstimulated thinking process with too many ideas and not enough time, jumping from thought to thought, sometimes speeding through motives just to get to the next one, and occasionally taking a breath and restating the theme. It’s a musical distraction, and it has rhythms only a saxophonist could live (my apologies to the accompanist).

Piano,Vocal,Voice - Level 3 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1002824 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. Contemporary. Score. 21 pages. NoteForge #2025307. Published by NoteForge (A0.1002824). Notes of Daybreak is a set of four Walt Whitman songs which all involve music in some way. The collection contains That Music Always Round Me, I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ, The Last Invocation, and I Hear America Singing.  

Piano Solo - Level 3 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1371588 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. 20th Century,21st Century,Classical. Score. 7 pages. NoteForge #955838. Published by NoteForge (A0.1371588). Thin Bright Lines is a piano miniature written on the occasion of Marvin Lamb's retirement. Most of it is in 8/8 for some reason.

Concert Band - Level 4 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1002838 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. Contemporary. Score and parts. 147 pages. NoteForge #6319911. Published by NoteForge (A0.1002838). Pipe Dreams is melodically obsessive and rhythmically fluid, pushing onward with an exuberant, overcaffeinated optimism.

Woodwind Ensemble Flute - Level 3 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1002833 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. Contemporary. 34 pages. NoteForge #5319511. Published by NoteForge (A0.1002833). Realms of Endless Day was commissioned by the University of Oklahoma Flute Ensemble in Spring 2010. The work is a type of reverse theme and variations, or a set of variations and then theme. It uses the Nettleton hymn tune as its source material, which begins slowly and transitions into a recognizable version of the tune.

Small Ensemble Clarinet,Piano,Voice - Level 4 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1002840 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. Contemporary. Score and parts. 29 pages. NoteForge #6718201. Published by NoteForge (A0.1002840). From the poet: Herein a sequence of poems done with some pain, all based loosely on the kind of letters little magazine editors so often discover with submissions (or from reading between the verses); and which began as a kind of necessary valve to let off some editorial frustration. My purpose has not been to attack individuals, but to parody, with charity I hope, some of the best known types...at least one of which we all have probably been at one time or another..

Instrumental Duet,Piano Alto Saxophone,Clarinet,Instrumental Duet,Piano - Level 5 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1002829 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. Contemporary. Score and parts. 46 pages. NoteForge #3885237. Published by NoteForge (A0.1002829). Earmarks is a musical (and hopefully humorous) view of some of the issues in today's political climate, designed to make you make you laugh--or to make you think. And definitely to make you talk. It starts out with Echo Chamber, where everything you hear is everything you want to hear. As we move more and more of our lives online, we're at the mercy of algorithms that try to deliver more of what we like--and give us options for removing that which we don't. The more time we spend in these echo chambers, the less we hear from dissenters. (The piano tries to come in with a new idea later in the movement, but is largely ignored).The second movement, Filibuster, does what I initially intended. Although all three instruments do get to play, it's a lot of repeated, pleasant-sounding milquetoast stuff without a great deal of substance that never really resolves. And it has a repeat sign at the end that allows it to be played as many times as the performers wish. How long this movement is depends entirely on the whim of the pianist. A swing state is a state with a similar level of support for both parties that can go either way during an election. Likewise, Swing States is a piece for saxophone and piano, and a piece for clarinet and piano, and it's a struggle to see who's going to win. Will they sort out their differences? Will we?

Alto Saxophone,B-Flat Clarinet,Instrumental Duet - Level 5 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1246358 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. 21st Century,Chamber. 32 pages. NoteForge #841109. Published by NoteForge (A0.1246358). Joyride is a clarinet and alto saxophone duet that oscillates from being loud and raucous when it thinks you're not looking to well-behaved and almost polite when it catches you watching. The back-and-forth motive suggests either a lack of control by either player or a complete abdication of any responsibility. Sure, there are some nice chorale-sounding moments, but even those get a little out of hand when in the hands of these two. Seriously, don't trust them. Years later, they'll look back on this and say It seemed like a good idea at the time..

Choral Choir (SATB) - Level 4 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1002837 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. Contemporary. Octavo. 14 pages. NoteForge #5319529. Published by NoteForge (A0.1002837). The more I compose, and the more I teach composition, the more I think about memory. After all, to write engaging music, the composer has to rely on the memory of their audience. Whether it is the memory of an earlier theme, an expectation that is met in an unexpected way, or writing in a style reminiscent of times past, we rely on the audience to cover the rift. Fittingly, Mnemosyne, by the American poet Trumbull Stickney (1874-1904), is named after the Greek goddess of memory and the mother of the nine Muses. Stickney tells a story of remembrance and nostalgia, relying on our own memories and supplying us with more, with the refrain of the country we remember.

Alto Saxophone,Soprano Saxophone - Level 5 - Digital Download SKU: A0.1246350 Composed by Kyle Vanderburg. 21st Century,Chamber. Saxophone Duet. 32 pages. NoteForge #841098. Published by NoteForge (A0.1246350). Joyride is a saxophone duet that oscillates from being loud and raucous when it thinks you're not looking to well-behaved and almost polite when it catches you watching. The back-and-forth motive suggests either a lack of control by either player or a complete abdication of any responsibility. Sure, there are some nice chorale-sounding moments, but even those get a little out of hand when in the hands of these two. Seriously, don't trust them. Years later, they'll look back on this and say It seemed like a good idea at the time..