Mare Crisium by Elliott Sharp

COMPOSED AND PRODUCED BY ELLIOTT SHARP

Performed by Angela Babin, Sally Gates, Matteo Liberatore, Gian Perez, Kevin Ramsay, and Elliott Sharp

Mare Crisium, for six electric guitars, premiered at Main Drag Music in Brooklyn on June 19, 2025. Compositional strategies include difference tone effects, shifting dronalities, algorithmic instruction sets, graphic notation, overtone melodies, and group improvisation and include materials first used in the works Yugen (1973), Attica Brothers/Life Cycle (1975), Interference (1979), Larynx (1987) and pieces written for my 1993 guitar quartet 'Dyners Club.

Formed by ancient volcanic activity, Mare Crisium is viewed by those on Earth as one of the moon's "seas" but is in reality a basaltic plain. It is immortalized in literature as the site of Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Sentinel, considered to be one of the seeds for his later work with Stanley Kubrick, 2001- A Space Odyssey as well as being told in song by Roger McGuinn and The Byrds on the album The Notorious Byrd Brothers.

To many observers, the United States, even the entire globe, is immersed in a sea of crises of our own making. Can these be resolved without total apocalypse? There are both utopian visionaries and dire doomsayers with strong opinions on either side. Mare Crisium offers a non-linear, non-rational coded sonic response to the situation and hopes to provide positive psychoacoustic chemical change to the players and listeners.

Elliott Sharp: composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, author, leads Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics and Terraplane with compositional strategies including fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors as well as new techniques for graphic notation to yield work that catalyzes a synesthetic approach to musicmaking as well as functioning as retinal art.