Ensemble Pamplemousse, This is the Uplifting Part. Dave Broome.

by Christopher Bailey, performed by David Alan Broome on January 9, 2016 @ JACK in Brooklyn, NY

David Broome, piano

The Red Gloves began as a theater piece inspired by hand gestures from everyday life. From sipping tea to a boxing batch, we took the gestures we were most attracted to and began building scenes. As we worked the piece became less about the specific gestures and more about the gesture of creating together. While we were making the piece, I began to think of us as a Little Rascals Gang in the world of performance art. In the end, this 54 minute performance art piece, boiled down into this 24 minute short film, is a clownish visual poem about how the grandest narrative of all is not any single story and what lesson or moral it might hold but just about how we experience them together. Billy Schultz 2016

Composed by David Bird, Performed by Dave Broome, October 14th, 2014, at QUBIT's New Music for Organ and Electronics concert at Saint Peter’s Church in New York City. The Universal Product Code (UPC) is a barcode symbology (i.e., a specific type of barcode) that is widely used in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and other countries for tracking trade items in stores. Its most common form, the UPC-A, consists of 12 numerical digits, which are assigned specifically to each trade item. Each of the 12 numerical digits contain, and reference, a specific 7-digit binary code. I use these 7-digit codes to construct a unique rhythm and pitch class for each of the 12 readable numbers listed on a barcode. To construct a harmonic framework which matches the vertical spectrum of the barcode, I’ve transposed each pitch class by fifths (every 7 semitones). Using this approach I am able to read a bar code vertically (90 degrees) as a linear harmonic spectrum while articulating this spectrum in a rhythmic fashion dictated by the horizontal display of the same code. Like barcodes, musical notation is a form of digital symbology. Commercial Vignette aims to highlight the disparity between different forms of digital representation. In this case: the product the barcode aims to represent, the barcode itself, the musical notation used to articulate features of the barcode, and the eventual sonic result. Commercial Vignette was born out of a perverse interest in sensationalizing the arbitrariness of consumer commodities by mapping their representatives onto dramatic musical forms.