My chamber music

fave listening of this month
*
in the pic: Kali Malone

"musica assoluta" (gennaio 2024)

2024

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

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

# 15

Hexfarm is

Phil Bywater - Saxophones/Flutes
Dane Renshaw - Drums
Mat Ward - Bass Guitar/Vox

Track 2 from Hexfarm - who meet once a year to jam for a couple of days then head back to their various corners of the world : )

Cost/Benefit Erection - Hexfarm

Issa's lovely haiku led me to this improvisation (in D Dorian), played on 'A Frozen Moment' pad in Kontakt. Recorded in Reaper, mastered with CloudBounce.
Naviar haiku challenge: www.naviarrecords.com/about/naviar-haiku/

New Year's Sun (naviarhaiku521)

:::
my contribution
to
Naviar Records
Haiku Challenge 521

my interpretation of a
haiku
by
Issa

.
.
.

basking
in the New Year's sun...
my trashy hut

(orches_tra)shy* ::: naviar haiku 521

Day One Of Another

The title is taken from the poem "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry

Into the presence of still water

The aggregate contains six tritones, 0-6, 1-7, etc.
In 1-out-of-64 rows, the PCs of each tritone sound in just that order.
Then perhaps also the time-point gap between PCs 0 and 6 is smaller than the gap between 1 and 7, etc.  

This piece is made up all of the 957 rows that meet all these requirements.

Specifying the gaps between the tritones, one has a kind of jigsaw puzzle: to find a row with exactly those tritone time gaps.  

Sometimes such a puzzle has no solutions (for example when the sum of the gaps is odd).  

With gaps 1-2-3-4-5-7 one finds 38 solutions, the most, and these begin the piece; with gaps 1-3-5-7-9-11 one finds 1 solution, the least if not zero, and that row ends the piece.  Between, all the rows occur organized according to which puzzle they solve, the puzzles ordered so that the number of solutions weakly decreases.

With each statement, each tritone gets its own octave.

If one has the ear for it, one can attend to these details, or else just take in the energy of it all.  I would like this to looking at a descriptive picture either as a visit to a virtual 3D place (e.g. a fictive city street, mountainside room) or as a decorated planar region, typically bounded by a rectangle.  When musicians talk about "movement" and "line" and "implications," that's happening the musical equivalent of virtual space.  In reality, notes and sounds find all their places by compositional fiat and don't actually generate or cause one another.

The cover image more or less encodes the score.

Rational Exuberance (Not Your Grandparents' Twelve-Tone Music VI), for organ and piano

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

There are 362,797,056 ways to partition a three octave span into three aggregates.  Once you do so, reading each aggregate from low to high, you get three 12-tone rows.  If you further require that those rows feature at least 7 distinct interval classes, the 362,797,056 possibilities reduce to just 46.  One of those 46 possibilities plays the role here of a passacaglia-like chord progression.  

There are 144 ways to have three triads sit within the aggregate without any overlap.  Remarkably, one can cycle through those possibilities so that each step turns up just one new triad.  Such a cycle provides the figuration for the variations. 

The overall effect produces a counterpoint between two opposing notions of harmonic rhythm, one based on the cycle of aggregates, and one based on the the featured triads.

A Friendly Accord between Aggregates and Triads, for guitar

If a twelve-note chord features all the pitch classes, you can read it up to get a row. If the chord sits within three octaves, it can feature at most 7 different intervals (because 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8 =36).  There are just 46 ways to partition the 36 pitches in a three-octave span into three such chords.  

Each "variation" projects one of the 46 possibilities.  You hear each of the rows three times, but with the notes transposed into the three different chords.  

As with much of my music, there is no literal repetition, but also no attempt at "high profile contrast."  Rather the music invites the listener to attend to small differences, and in this case, exactly the small differences imposed by the universe or by the mathematics or however you prefer to think about it.  

It's hard to come up with "questions" like this, questions that indeed turn out to have a manageable but non-zero number of solutions. But having fixed such a question, the set of solution lies beyond human control.  The universe provides what the universe provides.  
This accepting of what I get interests me aesthetically, as does the privilege of having sufficient computer power now in the 21st century actually to discover all the solutions. 

Score on request.

The 46 Possibilities (Not Your Grandparents' 12-Tone Music VII), for bass clarinet

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!

Rational Exuberance, twelve instrument version

David Victor Feldman