My flute music

This Is Where It Gets Complicated, for flute alone

Tangled Lynes for flute alone

The title is an anagram.  

Decipher the anagram and you will discover precisely the experimental compositional procedure I employed to make this piece.  If you have trouble with the anagram, listen to the piece.  If you know the solo flute literature, then you'll be almost there.

If you'd like to play the piece, you'll either have to find another flutist and do it relay-race style, or record a few passages yourself so that you have time to switch flutes.  I'd also be open to realizations on other instruments (e.g. saxophones).

Desired Syntax, Dandy Din (1980), for superflute

Music for a Dance (1983), for solo flute

The opening and closing may seem pointillist, but by a gradual process of substituting notes for rests and then the reverse the texture becomes intensely contrapuntal.

Clearing, for flute and harpsichord

Realization #82 of an open form work. 

Details for those who want to know *what* they're hearing:

Some unheard but endlessly repeating  rhythmicized tone-row girds each realization of this work.

Any tone-row contains 220 trichords.  Graphed in time and interval space, each trichord  (as a triangle now) has a geometrical (signed) area.  While the area of any one triangle depends on the units chosen for both time and interval width, the ratio of two triangle areas is invariant of the units.  So ordering the 220 trichords by increasing area makes intrinsic sense.  
It also produces a distinct musical effect, you will hear it, suggestive of careful and gradual development.  The reasons why the mathematical strategy has this musical effect are complex and perhaps hard to foresee in advance.

Now transposing the row up a semitone but also forcing all the notes back  into the original octave changes the area of 1/4 of the trichord/triangles. This shuffles the trichord order and produces a kind of variation.  This work, as a whole, proceeds through all 12 of these transposition-derived variations.

Well that describe the timpani part anyway.  

The flute doubles the timpani always at some number of octave, and climbs in register during the stretch of each variation, flute register roughly correlated with trichord/triangle area.  Octave transpositions always apply to all the notes in a trichord in order to preserve the shape, which of course is the chief musical determinant here.

The flute part can be performed alone.  It can also be performed with the timpani part on fixed media.  But live performance of the timpani part would require 12 drums, and perhaps two players, and perhaps some technology for coordination (since the rhythms will be hard to count in the usual way).

If there's interest, I'll upload other realizations.  All realizations are both recognizably "the same piece" yet also reflective of the idiosyncrasies of the basic rhythmicized tone-row.

Sharp Shadows Shadowed, for Flute and Timpani

In the original score, from 40 years ago, the flutist sees two staves, one with just the notes to finger, one with just the tonguing notated as though a percussion part.  

The fingers and tongue run along in different meters, 4 against 3, then later 3 against 4, switching off at the quietest, shyest moment of the piece, midway.

This MIDI realization suffers, of course, from the lack of artistic coloring a master flutist would render.  But it is a practical piece and has had two brilliant performances.  Lately I have an alternative version of the score on a single stave, in a more traditional notation.  Everyone I know has a strong (but not necessarily the same!) opinion about which score, new or old, constitutes the better representation.  The old score conveys the theoretical ideas most immediately, but new score eliminates the hurdle of learning to read a strange notation before learning the piece.

As with my solo viola piece, Reflex employs a "row," but not of 12 pitches, but rather of 24 4-note contours.

Much atonal music of its day had an exaggeratedly nervous surface, with rapid changes in register and articulation perhaps suggesting an analog for the tortured marks of a certain stripe of abstract expressionistic painting (already then a style past its heyday, but music always gets there late).  Influenced by minimalism, this piece aims for something more solid, a single, integrated gesture.  

One might hear Nancarrow as an influence, but I couldn't yet have had much more than a tiny taste of his music, with those records containing his complete works still some years away from release.

Reflex, for solo flute

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

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My flute music

David Victor Feldman