All spoken, sung, and piano parts performed by Thomas Otten. Studio mix created by composer Frances White, Princeton, NJ.

I reconnected with Ms. White, my college roommate, after a twenty-year hiatus. She had become a renowned figure in the area of composition using computers/electronic sound, having been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for her work. As I was in the process of transitioning back into more technically demanding piano playing following my playing injury, I became interested in commissioning her to write a piece that would allow me to express myself both through the piano and my voice (I had been studying singing since 2005). This became a reality when I received a Humanities and Fine Arts Award for the commission, allowing us to collaborate intensely in the co-creation of the most challenging work I have ever performed: Maurice Remembered for pianist/baritone with electronic sound. The text for the work was drawn from E.M. Forster’s gay-themed novel Maurice, while the music referenced “Ondine” from Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. I was deeply engrossed in both at the time that Ms. White and I were roommates. The sonic landscape of the work was comprised of live piano and vocal performance, along with electronic music derived from recorded piano and natural sounds. Ms. White used various sophisticated digital audio techniques to process these recordings, creating a multi-dimensional sonic space with which I interacted quite freely. By utilizing my past recordings of the Ravel as a source for the electronic track, she created a fascinating – and radical – unification: pianist, singer, and electronic sound as an expression of “multiple selves,” intertwined with multiple dimensions of time (past and present performances occurring simultaneously). It was premiered at UNC’s Digital Arts Festival.