My solo music

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

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

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

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.

Please don't spam this account!

Tangled Lynes for flute alone

David Victor Feldman