My chamber music

fave listenings of this month

in the pic: Lamonte Young

"musica assoluta" (gennaio 2023)

2023

“annus novus”

bagpipes: An unknown woman practicing bagpipes in the park.
Vocals: Vocaloid Yukari
Art work: Juanita Mulder via Pixabay

この年は
おわりの年か
風冴えて

Is this the year of the end?
The wind is sparkling.

annus novus

Annus Novus

Marco Lucchi : piano, synthesizers and found sounds

2 gennaio 2023

https://freesound.org/people/felix.blume/sounds/667639/

Hourglass [1]

Neu 23

010223002 Mutables

The night slowly surrenders (At the gates of dawn)

The late 70s were probably the golden age of musical "set theory" (better described as "musical combinatorics").  Twelve-tone theory had evolved to great maturity by then, still few yet found the associated music in any way retardataire.  But computers were slow then, difficult to program, and confined to large institutions.  Thus the answers to many simple, musically meaningful questions remained unattainable.  Now (with Moore's Law flattening) should be the golden age!

All-interval rows have been around for more than a century.   Morris and Starr could enumerate them all in 1974 --- starting on pitch class 0, there exist 3856.  

This piece works with a special, and essentially unique pair of such, namely
[0 11 19 25 28 38 39 44 46 53 57 66 ]
[0  4  7 15 22 32 33 35 41 50 61 66 ].
Traditionally, twelve-tone rows order pitch classes in *time*, and that leaves register as either a free and expressive dimension or else a parameter that the composer may control by other means.   In this piece the rows order the register of the tones, thereby determining two twelve note chords (hence my choice above not to reduce mod 12).  

Any chord built up from an all-interval row will span exactly 5 1/2 octaves; and these two all interval rows, taken together, their union divides those 5 1/2 octaves more evenly than will any other pair (save their inversions, of course).  

The result is, paradoxically, maximal harmonic contrast between two full aggregate chords.   With the rows controlling register,  the two chords get broken melodically in myriads of ways.  Structurally they push against each other, blurring any hard distinction between the linear and vertical, or, if you will, the melodic and the harmonic.

(Of course bad puns in the title are a doff of the hat to Milton Babbitt.)

A Tier of Two Series (piano and marimba)

a local habitation, for e flat clarinet

Morphosis, for oboe

Can Chance Music Be Sentimental?   No. 2

Can Chance Music Be Sentimental?  No. 1

There's also a version with obbligato alto flute (or alto sax).

The Turbulent Surge, for two pianos (Not Your Grandparents' 12-Tone Music VI)

At first blush this music may seem to hearken back to the the Second Viennese School,  but stay with it for a few minutes and you will hear something altogether different.  This is actually as consonant as that music is dissonant.  The organization is more diatonic than serial though far more than twelve notes occupy each octave, and the harmonic universe slowly progresses through related keys like a symphonic development section does.

Trio for Strings

Six parts, each in a different meter, intertwining in a Brownian way.

Luctuosa desideria for piano, marimba, brass and cello

The 25 sections of this deliberately generic pointillistic music alternate between two types of pitch material:
1) atonal, actually simplistic serial using only untransposed prime form;
2) diatonic (in a sequence of keys that follows the row of 1)).

Babbitt famously described Arthur Berger's Duo for Cello and Piano as "diatonic Webern" (some say "white-note Webern").    If you have the ear for it, the "diatonic Darmstadt" sections will stand in stark contrast from the atonal sections.    Or maybe just in gentle contrast.  And doubtless some people won't detect the boundaries and others will start to hear the structure here only after repeated listenings.

My aesthetic object here really lies in the staged moment of awareness concerning the distinctions the brain can make (or not), that and awareness concerning how the meaning of a fixed sonic object varies with the listener.  "Experimental music" usually refers to an experiment designed by the composer, and executed by the performer, but here the listener experiments by reflecting inward on what they can hear and how it feels to hear it.

All that said, I hope you find the surface pleasant enough albeit, for me, not an end in itself.

Ishihara Test For The Ear (for piano and harp)

If a composer wishes to avoid tonality, wishes to avoid the monarchical tyranny of tonic, then a simple (but not sure-fire) recipe consists in working a symmetrical treatment of the totality of pitches (with said totality often going by the name "total chromatic," or more generally "aggregate," but aggregate can also mean a totality of anything).  The twelve-tone system treats pitch classes symmetrically by design, and aleatoric methods also prove quite effective.  Other tyrants can arise aside from tonics.  So if mezzo-forte, or the central octave, or the 16th-note should threaten domination, a composer can also serialize (or randomize) dynamics, tessitura, or duration, etc.  In practice, all this fair treatment of possibilities, all this fiat symmetry, can ironically make tyrants out of the relevant aggregates themselves, effectively replacing monarchy, one might say, by obsessive bureaucracy, with the ear experiencing concomitant fatigue (not necessarily a bad thing depending on the composer's artistic goal).  In any case the emergence of this irony perhaps explains the briefness for total serialism's vogue.  Long ago, atonal composers working more freely discovered the trick of "keeping a note in your pocket" only to pull it out again when you need it to sound fresh---and it will.  

This piece plies a latter-day total serialism (but a serialism not anchored in rows) which governs pitch, tessitura, rhythm, dynamics and articulation, but which has the note-in-the-pocket wisdom inscribed in its genetics.  The 81 sections survey all 80 hexachord-up-transposition classes (the final section reprising the first, a whole-tone scale), with each section signaled by the entrance of a single pocketed pitch class and less noticeably by the departure of another (so traversing a Hamiltonian circuit through hexachord space).  Likewise, a Hamiltonian circuit through time-point "hexachords" (a la Babbitt) characterizes the rhythm.  But then each hexachord gets developed by a special type of Hamiltonian circuit through all 20 of its own sub-trichords, with the instantiation of each trichord pulling a note of a shallower pocket. 

The spare texture of the present work pays homage to John Cage, specifically works from his Lou Harrison period, to Morton Feldman, specifically his late pattern pieces, to Jo Kondo, specifically his hockets, and to Jonathan Kramer, specifically his process pieces and works with restricted pitch sets.

The Note in Your Pocket (My Travels Through Hexachord Space), for two melody instruments

There are fundamentally 713 distinct ways to partition the aggregate (a.k.a chromatic scale)into four trichords.  Of these, 290 have no trichord type repeated and these I'm calling the tetra-trichords.  Call two tetra-trichords neighbors if they share at least three trichords types.  

This piece follows a loop, from neighbor-to-neighbor, through most of the space of tetra-trichords, 288 of them.  The two omitted tetra-trichords only neighbor one-another, so refuse to play along.  They deserve a piece all their own (I'll get to it!).

So this is fundamentally "twelve-tone" (but not row) music, as in all twelve tones are more or less constantly active and in equal proportions.  But thinking of the trichords as the-new-notes, the aggregate becomes a kind of super-chord, and the whole piece a super-four-part-chorale, with consecutive super-chords always sharing a common "tone" (actually, a common trichord) for good (super)-voice-leading.  

So this is twelve-tone music with no direct input from common practice, yet very audibly working with analogous ideas.

My Travels Through (Most of) Tetra-trichord Space, for flute, clarinet, bassoon and celesta

Composer, mathematician, visual artist. 
Seeks collaboration with performers and choreographers.

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A Tier of Two Series (piano and marimba)

David Victor Feldman