My solo music

2023

New & hot: Classical

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)

Solo Piano.  Created LIVE at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, Carmel Valley Village CA.

Photo and graphic design by Mariam Shatilova, my girlfriend.

Year of Music XII

Year of Music: July 3, 2023

More here : <a href="adeasound.com">adeasound.com</a>
Nature-themed Lullaby. “Immerse yourself in serene and peaceful landscapes, guided by gentle melodies that surround them. Imagine yourself sitting by a stream, cradled by its calming melody. The shimmering reflections of the sun dance on the water’s surface, illuminating your face with a magical glow.”

Berceuse sur le thème de la nature. "Je t'invite à te perdre dans des paysages sereins et paisibles, guidé par les mélodies douces qui t'entourent. Imagine-toi assis au bord d'un ruisseau, bercé par sa mélodie apaisante. Les reflets argentés du soleil dansent à la surface de l'eau, illuminant ton visage d'une lueur magique."

Paisible

This instrumental piece is dedicated to those buried in the 6,000 year old chambered cairn known as Greadal Fhinn in the Scottish Highland peninsula of Ardnamurchan. In a remote windswept area (the most westerly on the British mainland)the cairn is said to be the burial place of the Viking chieftain Ketill Flatnefr ('flatnose') who fled Norway in 888 AD and became known locally as Caithil Fin. 
On his death the sagas relate the use of this ancient site as his last resting place. Who knows what ceremonies were performed there in his honour or the rites and rituals for the dead in the millennia prior to the demise of old 'Flatnose'....

Pic: the main stone 'cist' which remains of the cairn entrance - evidence also suggests there was once a large stone circle around the 22 metre burial site.

Greadal Fhinn Stomp

P. Brent Register - Suite for Flute, Oboe, Horn, and Piano: II. Romance

The music theory behind the piece:  

The 7-note scale here consists of seven of the eight tones one obtains by dividing the octave into eight parts.  This scale affords seven distinct trichords (i.e. three-tone sonorities) up to transposition.  Turns out that one can select *particular* transpositions of the trichords, so that 
1) any two notes in the scale belong to exactly one of these special trichords, and 
2)also any two of these special trichords have a common tone.    

Of the total 5040 permutations of the seven tones, 168 preserve the set of special trichords just described, and these permutations thus constitute symmetries of the configuration.   

The basic material of the piece is a 7-tone "cyclic row"  which, when played in canon with itself, produces the 7-special trichords (as two consecutive notes from the first voice and one from the second voice).
Some of those 168 symmetries simply spin the cycle, so the symmetries generate only 168/7=24 variations.  

The piece consists of producing these variations in a florid style.

The work can be performed on harp by retuning a mere 9 strings to obtain the necessary quarter tones.   The performance requires no pedaling.

as the moon releases twig by twig the night-entangled trees, for harp

When You Wish Upon A Star

In twelve-tone theory, an all-interval row means an ordering of 12 distinct pitches so that neighboring pairs exhibit 11 distinct intervals.  Most rows have 48 distinct forms (twelve each: prime, inverted, retrograde and retrograde inverted). 

Now think of the musical transformation from one row form to another as a sort of "generalized interval."   

This piece is built on a "row" of the 48 forms (of one particular all-interval row) arranged so that neighboring pairs exhibit all 47 nontrivial generalized intervals.  This not only exhibits a rare and remarkable mathematical structure, but because the musical treatment here avoids the usual (perhaps) gratuitous complexities of twelve-tone music, this structure should emerge clearly, surely for any trained ear, and indeed convey coherence even to the casual listener.

The 48 Forms  ...for solo violin (MIDI realization) (alternate version)

In twelve-tone theory, an all-interval row means an ordering of 12 distinct pitches so that neighboring pairs exhibit 11 distinct intervals. Most rows have 48 distinct forms (twelve each prime, inverted, retrograde and retrograde inverted). Now think of the musical transformation from one form to another as sort of "generalized interval." This piece is built on a "row" of the 48 forms (of one particular all-interval row) arranged so that neighboring pairs exhibit all 47 nontrivial generalized intervals. This not only exhibits a rare and remarkable mathematical structure, but because the musical treatment avoids the usual gratuitous complexities of twelve-tone music the structure should emerge clearly for any trained ear and seem coherent even to the casual listener.

Written for and dedicated to my daughter Linnea Feldman Emison.

A score is currently available from the composer on request.

The 48 Forms  ...for solo violin (MIDI realization)

The structure of this music might remind the listener of Mandelbrot zoom videos, albeit the videos usually zoom in, and this music virtually speaking zooms out.  

The fundamental tone row, like nearly every twelve-tone row, has 48 distinct forms.  The zooming out process causes one form gradually to morph into the next (each morphing takes almost a minute), suggesting a sort of fractal structure.    The relationship between a form and the one to which it morphs determines the micro details of rhythm and phrasing.  Variety arises because of a special ordering of the 48 versions that exhibits all 47 possible relationships between the before-and-after occur exactly one (so for example the final form only equals the retrograde of the preceding one).

This MIDI version stands to any potential human performance as a photograph does to an oil painting derived from it.  The human performer will add nuance, but will necessarily have to artfully and approximately suggest some of the delicate, inhumanly fast passage work. 

Leaving, for violin

This piece is from about 1978.   Solo string music doesn't lend itself to MIDI realization, but this is the best I have as yet.

Like much of my work, the score is in a spatial notation, not because I have vague rhythmic notions, but because my precise ideas would look hideous in standard metric notation.  Thus I prefer players to read a simplified score, really an for aide-memoire, but get the gist of the rhythmic structure from a sound file, thereby doing some important learning by ear.   Learning by ear is a crucial component of folk traditions, and I've hoped to bring folk fluency to into synthetic and experimental musical situations.

Certainly at the time I perceived new classical music as generally held back by alienated performances symptomatic of over-dependence on merely  decoding complicated scores but without a vivid aural conception informing the interpretation.   

7-tet abbreviates seven tone equal temperament.   So the listener will hear a diatonic scale with neutral thirds and no leading tone(s).    One probably doesn't associate "atonality" with music that moves in steps, but the symmetry of the scale does avoid the development of traditional tonal centers.

Arboreal Arabesques in 7-tet for violin (MIDI realization)

An old friend remembered this piece to me that I wrote for her back in high school about 45 years ago.  So I sequenced it so we could hear it (again).   Sadly, can't get sul tasto, sul ponticello, artificial harmonic effects.

Edit:
Some many months ago I posted here a very short viola piece.  Though I'd  originally conceived  it as a final movement, just as it stands here now, at the time of its completion I decided to deem it an independent work.  That reflected my feeling that my style had  undergone a significant shift since I'd written the first movements more than a year before.  Well, at a distance of more than four decades, the style shift seems negligible and multi-movement work seems to have a distinctive shape.

Sonata For Viola Alone

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

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as the moon releases twig by twig the night-entangled trees, for harp

David Victor Feldman