Ethan Hayden | bats with baby faces in the violet light

bats with baby faces in the violet light was created using the sounds of various objects the composer found around his home. the sounds are arranged into various gestural contexts, often with very little signal processing. the primary aesthetic aim of the piece is to exploit the unplanned and frequently unpredictable pitched sounds which often burst forth from, or which are components of, noisier, percussive gestures.

the title comes from a line in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land:

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And ﬁddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in the air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells

Instrumentation:	2-channel fixed media
Date:	spring 2011
Length:	ca. 7'
Premiere:	30 March 2011 Ethan Hayden, live 4-channel diffusion Center for the Arts' Black Box Theatre Buffalo, NY
Awards:	Finalist for ASCAP/SEAMUS Student Commission Competition (2014) 2nd prize in Musicworks Magazine Electronic Music Composition Contest (2012)
Program Note:	bats with baby faces in the violet light was created using the sounds of various objects the composer found around his home. the sounds are arranged into various gestural contexts, often with very little signal processing. the primary aesthetic aim of the piece is to exploit the unplanned and frequently unpredictable pitched sounds which often burst forth from, or which are components of, noisier, percussive gestures. the title comes from a line in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land: A woman drew her long black hair out tight And ﬁddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in the air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells