Greed
for violin and fixed media
ABOUT
Greed was commissioned by and is dedicated to Abderrahman Anzaldua as part of the La Rueda de los Pecados (The Wheel of Sins) project. This project consists of seven pieces for violin and multimedia, each of which reflects upon a specific sin.
While I was composing Greed I thought about different phenomena that one can be greedy about. I represent three of these in the work: collecting trinkets, amassing monetary wealth, and acquiring beautiful segments of land. Each of these facets of greedy behavior is associated with specific musical material and visual media. These materials abstractly represent both the beauty and/or neutral-ness of the object of desire, and juxtapose the objects themselves with the ugliness and results of selfish, thoughtless acquisition. The visual media represents this via algorithms that tend to progressively fill the screen with different objects or represent acquisition and loss by having some objects grow while others diminish in size. The specific objects are points (trinkets), rectangles (money), and circles (land). The video was created in Processing and processed in Aftereffects.