My piano music

 If at very first this music strikes your ear as cacophonous, then perhaps after a minute or two the harmonic and contrapuntal logic may nevertheless emerge.  Though atonal and indeed strictly serial, the plan features a cycle of "harmonies," roughly as in a Baroque chaconne and highly linear voice leading.   

Part of my ongoing project to explore new ways to reconcile traditional music values with those still(!) controversial 20th century techniques widely understood to represent a complete break with the past. 

An Unceasing Storm is a Kind of Calm, for piano

Multiple hands keep all registers of the piano engaged nearly constantly with contrast made in other ways.  A type of "moment form" makes disjunct, atonal material surprising legible even on a first hearing.  The music seems to tell a story propulsively, but a story with no beginning, middle or end. 

When the Clouds in Autumn Crack (2016) for piano four hands

From a set that includes
https://soundcloud.com/david-victor-feldman/our-ringlets-to-the-whistling-wind-2016-for-piano-four-hands 
and
https://soundcloud.com/david-victor-feldman/when-the-clouds-in-autumn-crack-2016-for-piano-4-hands



there's no clock in the forest (2016) for piano four hands

You will hear one structure filtered through another.   Leaving aside here any description of the complex underlying structure, the filter simply quantizes (or patterns or metricizes) the otherwise very free rhythms, but on and off every few seconds.  This makes an audible yet subtle contrast, but does not jar the larger musical flow.   

Having finalized the composition,  I abruptly realized its conceptual similarity with a beautiful series of drawings by my friend Jessica Rosner.   In this series she conceives symmetric geometrical structures and then executes half the design freehand, half with straightedge.   The contrast in techniques makes a structure that coexists with a structure leaving the viewer freedom where to direct her mind.

Jessica has generously lent me her running title and permission to feature a very recent addition to this body of work as the cover image for this track.
Find more of her work at http://jessicadeanerosner.com .

Ruled Unruled for piano four hands

The algorithm is simple:  note  n  appears on beats f_n + f_m where
the sequence f_n runs over Fibonacci numbers (positive and negative): ...-377 -233 -144  -89 -55  -34 -21 -13  -8  -5  -3  -2  -1  0  1 2  3  5  8  13 21 34  55 89 144 233 377...  The notes themselves come from a scale that repeats, not at the octave, but at the fifth: 
(b$-3) (c-2) (e$-2) (f-2) (g-2) (b$-2) (c-1) (d-1) (f-1) (g-1) (a-1) (c1) (d1) (e1) (g1) (a1) (b1) (d2) (e2) (f#2) (a2) (b2) (c#3), so the emergent structure is naturally polytonal and  seems to modulate from flat to sharp keys.

Music For Piano Four Hands (The Sums Of Two Fibonacci Numbers) (1978)

We live in strange, sad times.

Recently, for an utterly practical purpose, someone asked me the following question:  

12 people who need to meet by Zoom (due to the pandemic) would all like to get to know each other, one-on-one.  But to save time, they'd like to break out repeatedly into 4 groups of 3 (rather than into groups of 2).  How many times will they have to do so for every pair of people to meet at least once in some small group?

Turns out they will have to break out 7 times, but this means 18 pairs of people will meet twice, so, while best possible, not a very tight solution.  

I sent them such a plan.

Then it occurred to me that if they'd allowed one break out into 3 groups of 4, things can work out perfectly tightly with just 5(=4+1) break outs total..

And then I thought, what if I treated pitch (classes) as the people?  

That makes the groups of 3 into trichords, 4 each from the 4 breakouts into 4 groups of 3.  So then it would seem nice to have all  16 trichords harmonically distinct (even up to transposition, which makes trichords come in 19 possible flavors total).

It turns out that there exist only 20 basic ways (of assigning pitches to people) that accomplish this. 

One of those forms the floor plan of this piece.

But also on my mind: a friend recently lost a close family member. I felt very sad to learn that the pandemic will prevent his relatives from actually gathering, so they have planned a Zoom memorial.   

And so, as I worked on this piece, I began to conceive it as a strange kind of funeral march, albeit without meter or tonality.  Thus  I dedicate it to the memory of all we have lost and will lose in this worldwide catastrophe.

Zoom Memorial, for piano

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

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An Unceasing Storm is a Kind of Calm, for piano

David Victor Feldman