The Monster (Terribilis est locus iste) for oboe or clarinet, CD, and cell phones (2014).

The Monster is a work about the human ego, hubris, and technology gone bad. Filippo Brunelleschi was the brilliant artist, architect and engineer who created the remarkable dome of the cathedral in Florence, Italy. Brunelleschi devised a clever way to build the dome over the cavernous space of the Cathedral when no one else could figure out how to span a space so large. Work on the dome went on for years and Brunelleschi was frustrated that he wasn't making much money from it, so he devised a plan to win the bid to supply marble for the cathedral. He designed a boat that would be powered by mechanical paddle wheels. This boat would cut down on the cost of transporting the marble, allowing him a handsome profit in spite of his low bid. The project ruined him financially. The boat worked most of the time but would occasionally malfunction disastrously. Because of this, Brunelleschi's workers dubbed the boat, "the monster". The story symbolizes our frustration with buggy technology and it shows how a brilliant man was ruined by greed and ambition. When the dome was finished, the great composer Guillaume Dufay wrote a motet for its dedication. Dufay's work is a mensuration canon. It's based on a single melody, but that melody is designed in such a way that it can be performed at different speeds and in different musical meters at the same time. I decided to do my own realization of the canon. In transcribing this ancient music into modern notation I noticed that mistakes kept appearing. The music would work beautifully for a while then it would go "off the rails" for a few seconds before righting itself again. Rather than seeing the mistakes as "bugs" in the music's program, I treated them as features—features that symbolized Brunelleschi's monster as it periodically failed.

The Monster, Jeanne Belfy, oboe, (excerpt).