Premieres at REDCAT, Los Angeles on June 26-27, 2026.
Completed at the Kayenta Arts Centre.
Piece Format: featured
Colours
In the 20-minute video work Colours, Daniel Corral explores color through sound, language, and light. The film samples brief moments from popular songs that name a color, pairing each excerpt with the written word as it shifts hue onscreen. Through repetition, the work produces subtle visual and auditory hallucinations that draw attention to each color’s formal qualities: rhythm, tone, and the word itself. The result is a relationship to color that is both internal—the sensations shaped by individual perception—and shared as widely recognizable cultural references.
Available from Music for Your Inbox from January 1, 2026 to February 28, 2026, paired with mail art from Kate Gorman!
Two of Pentacles
Two of Pentacles is a solo performance for Lou Harrison National Resonator guitar and 7 of my 20 Eikosany chimes. I play the JI guitar, and the chimes will be played through robotic triggers. The 7 notes are the pitches that overlap between the Lou Harrison’s guitar tuning at the Eikosany chimes I built last year. For this juggling of systems and for this period in my own career and life, Two of Pentacles is a very appropriate symbol.
Two of Pentacles was created with support from a City of Los Angeles Master Artist Project Grant.
Four of Wands
Four of Wands album
Premiered by myself, Erin Barnes, Cory Beers, and Andrew Lessman on December 17, 2022 at Automata LA.
Four of Wands began as a sketch for a concept I’m developing for my upcoming COLA IMAP performance in June, 2023. The piece creates a contemplative space through a series of gradually changing chords on 20 just-intonation chimes. These chords manifest through shifting polyrhythms connected to the frequency of each chime. I originally titled it 4 for 20, but Four of Wands felt much more in line with what I was aiming for at the time.
This piece continues my 8 years of making just-tuned chimes, as well as my gradual descent into the wooly world of Erv Wilson microtonality. The chimes are tuned to a 1•3•5•7•9•11 Eikosany, and each musician plays 5 of them.
2025 press for Four of Wands
MetalJazz: “You may discover that this music puts you literally in tune with nature because of the simple numerical principles, which, when the numbers are combined, produce rich harmonies. When looked at that way, being a cipher no longer feels empty. A number can be manipulated, but its essence cannot be broken — it will continue even when it seems to be erased or alone. Faraway numbers are always resonating with it.
Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage
A collaboration with performer/director Alexander Gedeon, Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage combines live music and theatrical performance to reframe the cultural significance of the “worst album in rock and roll history.”
“Having Fun with Elvis on Stage” is a 1973 album collaged entirely from Elvis speaking on stage between songs at live concerts – no music. AllMusic’s Mark Deming declared “hearing it is like witnessing a car wreck, leaving onlookers too horrified and too baffled to turn away.” Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage reimagines this vilified recording as the libretto for a sort of ghost opera, combining pop art nostalgia with new technology and classical instruments to create a memetic hologram of the endless purgatory of celebrity afterlife.
My live musical score is performed along with the original LP as if they were the pit orchestra for opera or musical theater – sometimes harmonizing with the words, painting emotions in the spaces between, or reacting theatrically. Meanwhile, Gedeon’s “Elvis” persona becomes a vehicle to explore all things banal and absurd in pop idolatry, as well as the performative aspects of ‘stage presence.’
2020 press for Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage
Sequenza 21: “…carried off with exemplary production values and extraordinary performances, making the case that new music concerts can be experienced online at a high level.”
LA Times Cultural Pick: “Theater artist Alexander Gedeon and composer Daniel Corral deconstruct the myth of pop stardom in this musical fable with live accompaniment by the Now Hear Ensemble.”
LA Weekly: Arts Calendar Highlight
Polytope
Polytope album
Released Sept. 28, 2018 on Orenda Records
Polytope is a multimedia microtonal performance for MIDI quartet. Performed entirely in darkness, it’s a mesmerizing dance of silhouettes of fingers over colorful glowing MIDI buttons, captured on live feed video and projected large and bright as a moving, visual score.
Polytope is rhythmically charged in the vein of musical minimalists such as Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, or Arnold Dreyblatt, but harmonically inspired by the microtonal explorations of James Tenney, Erv Wilson, or Harry Partch. The multimedia style of presentation is somewhere between a string quartet, Kraftwerk, James Turrell, and an Indonesian dhalang (master shadow puppeteer).
Onstage, four MIDI controllers sit on a small square table. A single video camera captures the view from above. The controllers are not traditional keyboards; they are glowing grids of 8×8 buttons, rotated 45° to create tonality diamonds. One musician stands before each controller. In the dark, the overhead camera captures the colorful, changing patterns of grid lights and the fast-moving silhouettes of the musician hands. The live feed video is projected in the space, creating a larger than life, colorful multimedia experience inspired by Light and Space art that also acts as an evolving, visual score.
2018 press for Polytope
Riting: “Polytope embodies ‘the gold standard’ of ambient music — it can hover in the background and cast a subtle vibe, but will also stand up to closer inspection: delicately layered overtones cascade and recede, forming a spellbinding latticework. In moments, it’s not unlike water drops on a windshield, dripping and streaking reflected light with each movement of the wiper.”
Sequenza 21: “Polytope is an extraordinary piece of musical and visual art… that is both accessible and compelling.”
Vital Weekly: “Whatever it is, it sounds simply wonderful… worth your every while.”
The Stranger: “After five minutes of this silvery, undulant tintinnabulation, I was ready to evaporate into another more sparkly and stimulating dimension than the one in which we currently suffer. This piece sounds like gamelan from Pluto—or maybe ’70s Philip Glass as interpreted by Harry Partch on his Cloud-Chamber Bowls.”
New Classic LA (Interview): “Daniel Corral’s latest work, Polytope, premieres at Automata as part of this year’s MicroFest, who have named their season after it. We were lucky that Daniel had a minute to answer some questions about this piece…”
24700: “Composer, CalArts faculty and alumnus Daniel Corral (Music MFA 07) presents the live debut of his latest release Polytope to Automata in Los Angeles on Sunday (March 18). The concert is the featured performance of this year’s MicroFest 2018.”
SF Gate: “A mesmerizing visual and musical spectacle”
MetalJazz: “Musicians who know the turf”
The Rest is Noise: Miscellany
Polytope
Published in Xenharmonikon on January 4, 2022
This article describes the compositional and performance practices involved in my 2018 piece Polytope. This microtonal multimedia piece is performed by 4 musicians playing Launchpad Pros in total darkness, with live feed video and electronic 4-channel sound.
Requiem for György Ligeti
Requiem for György Ligeti
Requiem for György Ligeti is a giant music box created in memory of composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who died in June 2006. It was inspired by Ligeti’s Poem Symphonique, which involved 100 wind-up metronomes being set off at once. The Requiem was originally a part of Pandoras Box, a group installation that opened at the CalArts Main Gallery in March, 2007.
Requiem for György Ligeti played live
There are several ways to interact with the Requiem. The casual passerby can merely turn some of the silver knobs on the top of the box, each of which is attached to a different music box movement. If you are feeling more diligent, you can then push in the gold knob on the front of the box. This stops all of the movements from playing, so that you can wind up all 100. Once you have wound them all up, then pull the gold knob back out and they all start playing at once to create a micropolyphonic texture.There are several ways to interact with the Requiem. The casual passerby can merely turn some of the silver knobs on the top of the box, each of which is attached to a different music box movement. If you are feeling more diligent, you can then push in the gold knob on the front of the box. This stops all of the movements from playing, so that you can wind up all 100. Once you have wound them all up, then pull the gold knob back out and they all start playing at once to create a micropolyphonic texture.
Requiem for György Ligeti
Long Beach Soundwalk 2007 Long Beach Soundwalk 2007 Long Beach Soundwalk 2007 At CalArts 2007 At CalArts 2007 At CalArts 2007 At CalArts 2007
