Borderline was commissioned and premiered by Shauna Rolston, a Canadian cellist who’s a strong promoter of new music. The title Borderline comes from “Borderline Personality Disorders.” A borderline patient perceives the world in extremes. One moment someone they know is good and loving, another they are evil and deceitful. Borderline’s musical style is one of polar opposites–sharp, mechanical, synthesized sounds, and long lyrical cello phrases. I’ve written several works involving technology and live instruments, and while working with technology sounds interesting, it’s not really–wrestling with UNIX or Windows 95 is not what I call a good time. I find human beings, especially great musicians, far more interesting. They spend years learning how to play beautiful sounds and musical phrases and communicate with audiences. I spend a long time creating my tape parts (Borderline took me over 500 studio hours) only because my tape sounds have to be as interesting and vibrant as musicians they accompany. I wrote the piece for Shauna Rolston, a Canadian cellist with a huge, powerful, yet beautiful sound. That sound is the focus of the piece, and the tape augments and extends it, along with providing a harmonic accompaniment. I strive to have the synthesized sounds relate closely to the timbre of the live instrument, to draw the instrument and tape together to the point where you don’t quite know who’s playing what. The listener then focuses on their combined sound, and uses it to follow the form of the piece: introduction (exposition), development, recapitulation, and coda. I created the tape part using a 100Mhz Pentium machine running Windows 95 and NeXTStep. Most sounds were creating entirely in software, using “Rebirth”, Martin Fay’s brilliant “VAZ Plus,” and CMix NeXTStep software. The only “external” sounds came from a 1988 Yamaha DX7s. All mixing and effects were done in the NeXTStep program “RT.”
