Local Customs

Tom Hamilton is unquestionably among the most inquisitive minds around. Local Customs explores some obscure notions about music theory and performance practice, leading to sound combinations that are at once unsettling and yet somehow familiar. One discovers that there is very little in Local Customs that follows from conventionally intentional music writing. It is perhaps better to regard it as a group of artifacts of little-known origins, modified through new transformations into something further unexplained. The foundation for the piece is an "electronic harmony generator" that plays an endless sequence of chords exhibiting curious relationships with no purposeful direction. The musical lines for the ensemble ­ consisting of flute, clarinets, trombone, contrabass, percussion, and electronic harmony - accumulated from coding and decoding various readings, investigations, and experiences during a summer residency in Italy.