12.12.12 (2012) by Ken Ueno
for flute and viola
World premiere

This piece is dedicated to Tod Brody and Earplay. Much of my work is "person-specific" as well as "instrumentation-specific," which means that I derive structural aspects from considerations of the special instrumental skills of the performers with whom I collaborate. I also spend a considerable amount of time during the compositional process researching new instrumental possibilities, often testing out possibilities myself on the instruments. So, when Tod Brody came to present a flute demonstration for my undergraduate composition class at UC Berkeley in the spring of 2012, I was thrilled with what he showed us he could do with this glissando head joint! I even made a YouTube video – you can see it here. As much of my music features the use of multiphonics as the core of the harmonic discourse, I was especially interested to hear the result when I asked Tod to try glissing with multiphonics &mdash Eureka! This was the creative catalyst for my piece! The title reflects the date I completed the piece. Online, I discovered that it was International Dodecaphonic Day, a time to reassess our relationship to the grand legacies of the past, as well as our personal agons with them. It was also a day some mistook as the date of the Mayan Apocalypse. I heard on NPR that there was a spike in weddings that day. Whatever the case, the day highlighted, to me, a human tendency to invest meaning into an abstract happenstance.