A Death in Wyoming John G. Bilotta

Music for three synthesizers

A Death in Wyoming is an elegy for Matthew Shepard who was murdered in 1998 at the age of twenty-one. The music is introspective and abstract, not pictorial. A twelve-tone work utilizing three synthesizers, it is constructed from thirteen concurrent musical lines. It makes use of contrapuntal techniques, particularly canon and crab-canon forms. However, the form of the piece was not mechanically contrived—rather it was planned as a stately Adagio.

  • Year of composition: 1999
  • Hardware used: The work was composed in CuBase on an iMac using two Roland JV1080 modules and a Korg Triton synth module.
  • Duration of the submitted work: 2:53
  • Production: Diablo Valley College