My chamber music

2023

my monthly report 
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in the pic: Aleksandr Scriabin

"musica assoluta" (dicembre 2023)

Klangfarben pieces

With 12 pitch classes one has 144 2-note sequences or just 132 upon insisting on 2 distinct notes.  

Dividing these 132 sequences randomly into 3 "buckets" of about 44 sequences each one can seek out, for each bucket, all the 12-tone cycles that each bucket affords: so each adjacent pair of notes in each cycle must constitute a 2-note sequence in the affiliated bucket.

Now repeating this recipe millions of times, I eventually discover three instances where each bucket affords, in total, exactly 30 conforming cycles each.

Musically speaking, all the cycles associated to a particular bucket, seeing as how they got cobbled out of the same 2-note sequences, they all turn out to share a common feeling.   Moving from one bucket to the next that feeling changes.  Indeed I feel a distinct but subtle shift, akin, something to something like a key change or modulation and this occurs despite how composing with 12-tone cycles promotes consistent pitch saturation, and thus the classic "atonal" sound you will hear.

But honestly, even having composed the piece myself, and thus knowing in advance where to expect these quasi key changes, only after repeated hearings did I suddenly find these shifts, these reconfiguations, obvious.  

With three 30-30-30's, I had one to use to govern the pitch classes, but also one for durations, and one for orchestration.

Think of this as very unconventional 12-tone-music: the rows never get transposed or inverted or retrograded, but rather variety arises from employing multiple rows that happen, by design, to share common "DNA."  Rather than burying this "row technique" under some sort of subjective rhetoric, as traditional 12-tone composers feel they must, I organize all these materials for transparency, hoping for listeners to follow the goings on.  One usually views "complexity" and "minimalism" as opposite poles, but both attitudes inform every moment of this piece.

Fritillary, for small orchestra

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)

Marco Lucchi : synthesizers
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1 dicembre 2023
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Nel Museo nazionale romano di palazzo Altemps si conserva una testa in marmo che secondo la tradizione rappresenta un’Erinni addormentata. Gli occhi chiusi, i ciuffi dei capelli scarmigliati sulla fronte e la guancia, le labbra appena dischiuse, il volto della Furia – se di una Furia si tratta, sia essa Aletto, Megera o Tisifone – riposa quieto su un cuscino di buio marmo, come se sognasse.
Una furia che invece di gemere e urlare, scuotendo la chioma serpentina, chiude gli occhi e sogna, smentisce se stessa. Eppure proprio e soltanto il sogno o il sonno di una furia assomiglia al pensiero. Il pensiero non è soltanto contemplazione, è innanzitutto furore. Si dà pensiero, si dà contemplazione, solo se prima vi è stato furore, se guardando l’abominio degli umani e del mondo, la mente – diceva Bruno – discesa «ne la parte più inferna… si sente lacerare e sbranare». E solo se nel nostro eroico furore riusciamo a chiudere gli occhi e sognare, si ha vera quiete, si ha visione e teoria. I nostri sogni non sono allora fantasie a occhi aperti, che sappiamo ingannevoli e vane, ma verità a cui, anche se con gli occhi chiusi, non possiamo non credere, perché abbiamo prima visto la vendetta e l’errore. Il pensiero è questo acquietarsi del furore, è un’Erinni che sogna.

13 novembre 2023
Giorgio Agamben

Furore che sogna [1]

Ansynda [part 2]

Meanwhile, in a parallel dimension...

The assignment: describe a shadow using sound.

More on this 622nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Know the Shadow (The Assignment: Use recently discarded material to make something new), at: https://disquiet.com/0622/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0622-know-the-shadow/

throwing shade [disquiet0622]

Marco Lucchi : piano and synthesizers
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for the current Disquiet Junto challenge
https://disquiet.com/2023/11/30/disquiet-junto-project-0622-know-the-shadow/
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4 dicembre 2023

Afterlife [disquiet # 0622]

Up to transposition, there are 250 ways that an interval can transition to another interval without any note repeated (all notes within the chromatic scale).  The basic material here is a cycle of intervals that survey all 250 transitions.   Constant variations within the dimensions of timbre and articulation, though they might at first seem to work distractions away from the harmonic idea, actually mitigate exhaustion of the ear and so keep fresh the perception of all the intervals, and the intervals between intervals.

Every Bridge, for nine instruments

Some friends felt that my cover image for the piano and organ version wasn't a visual analog of the piece.  So here's a klangfarben version hopefully as colorful as the graphic (the new graphic is just a color morph of the old one - they're both visual representations of the score).

Rational Exuberance, twelve instrument version

Concertino for Vibraphone, Marimba, and Orchestra

Berceuse[BeSecure] for octet

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.

Please don't spam this account!

Every Bridge, for nine instruments

David Victor Feldman