Three Lines (for clarinet and piano)

O Espaço e o Timbre

Colin Labadie, guitar and electronics; Adam Tindale, percussion and electronics; Kasia Jachimowicz, flute

Improv - Labadie, Tindale, and Jachimowicz

Colour #1924 (Icy Grape) (extract)

Valsa Errante

Mundos Rochosos Potencialmente Habitáveis

En Passant II

Papyrus

It is perhaps not surprising that my parallel lives in music and applied mathematics (signal processing and coding) should at some point converge.  Over the years, this interest in the relations between aesthetic and algebraic structure has taken a number of forms, and most recently it has led to the discovery that some peculiar denizens of n-dimensional “sequence spaces”, called Costas sequences, exhibit internal symmetry properties that were considered musically desirable by Schoenberg, as well as an independent property that I have called “maximum distinctness under cyclic pitch and time shifts”.  Since pitch and time shifts are “canonical” musical operators (in both senses!) this property offers the possibility of a direct connection between distinctly algebraic and distinctly musical orders.  

Obviously the "state space" implied by the notion of sequences of discrete pitches under rotation and transposition is highly constrained, especially from the point of view of the extended vocabularies of twenty-first century musical practice.  The "experiments" that suggest themselves are fundamentally contrapuntal, with both harmonic and rhetorical structure arising as emergent properties of the movement of horizontal lines.  These experiments have been going on for some time, and the pieces on this page represent kind of a second generation, whose structural functions are, one hopes, more like a language.  Still, a very old-fashioned idea in the end, for which I offer no apology.  Every approach to composition has its own principles, and its own clichés too! Naturally I hope this music seems reasonably fresh, despite its mixed bag of historical and cultural influences and the inevitable limits of its creator's imagination.

Three Lines (for clarinet and piano)

Peter Anson

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