Angelus Novus refers to both the painting by artist Paul Klee, but also the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin refers to the painting in his critique of historicism and dialectic materialism. Benjamin’s interpretation of the piece is as follows:

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

This piece explores the timbral transformation of the saxophone through electronic processing as well as using pre-recorded processed saxophone samples, played forwards and backwards, to reflect the instrument back onto itself. The score of the piece is one page, indicating instructions and time stamps in which the performer is to play specific material. As the piece unfolds, the performer has the ability to jump to different sections, but in a specific, charted out manner, including moving forwards, backwards, sideways, etc. The form of the piece is structured to be self-referential, with the beginning and ending converging upon the center. The structure of the piece is inspired by the Klee painting, but also the structure of The Last Dance, the documentary about Michael Jordan and the 1998 Chicago Bulls. The documentary has a unique storytelling structure, focusing on the 1998 Bulls championship season, but builds up to that championship season by exploring Michael Jordan, his teammates, and the Bulls origins from the standpoint of the present. The past and future converging onto a singular moment in the documentary, is not unlike Benjamin’s interpretation of the Klee painting. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx writes:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”

As human beings, we have some agency and ability to take action, but we are not immune to the consequences of our actions. On the level of history, our actions can and do change the course of history in ways that we can’t imagine, as our efforts point beyond and transcend our conscious intentions. Throughout the piece, the player's decisions on how to navigate the score affects how the piece unfolds itself, and each performance may be different. There are two versions of the piece, one fixed media version for the performer to play at any time, and the live
processing version with a computer performer (which in most cases would be me). The added computer performer allows for more spontaneity and an additional element of improvisation in performance. This piece is dedicated to Dylan Ward, who premiered the work and for whom it was written.

Seth Andrew Davis is a performer and composer from the Kansas City area. He is involved in many different genres, including jazz, rock, classical, electronic, electroacoustic, and free improvisation. Davis graduated from the University of Missouri–Kansas City Conservatory in 2019 with a BM
in Music Composition, where he studied with Jim Mobberley, Paul Rudy, Zhou Long, Chen Yi, Mara Gibson and Michael Miller. Since fall 2021, Davis has been pursuing an MM in Music Technology at the University of Central Missouri, where he studies with Jeff Kaiser.

Davis’s music has been performed in the United States, Malaysia, and Indonesia. His work has been performed at various conferences and festivals, including the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Kansas City Performing Media Festival, NASA Regional IV Conference, Electronic Music Midwest, Exchange of Midwest Collegiate Composers, and he has had pieces premiered by Mnemosyne Quartet,Project C4, and Dionysus. As an artist, Davis works closely with performers and collaborators to create pieces, installations, and works that are unique to that partnership. Davis is an avid collaborator, having worked with choreographers, video artists, animators, and playwrights, among others. His artistic influences run the gamut from popular music, free-jazz, hip-hop, electronic music, film, literature, visual art, and contemporary culture, and from this he wishes to blur the lines between genres, composer and performer, and various artistic mediums. Davis has released his electronic music under the pseudonyms The Gods Hate Kansas, Mr. Sandman, and Ghost In The Machine, and is a founding member of Second Nature, a free jazz/new music/math-rock ensemble, BetaMax, Re-Animator, and is the guitarist in the new music ensemble Project C4. Davis is an active concert organizer in the Kansas City music scene and serves as the Vice President of KcEMA (Kansas City Electronic Music Alliance) and as the production
coordinator of newEar Contemporary Chamber Ensemble.