The conventional wisdom holds that chance operations abolish "glue" (Henry Cowell's term, but often invoked by Cage).  That idea rests on presuming that statistical independence governs how  the operations place musical events within the music framework.  Well, not here.

As x and y coordinatize the Euclidean plane, time and pitch coordinatize musical space as constructed say on a piano roll.  But there's a difference: the plane enjoys rotational symmetry, but its far from clear how one would even compare the magnitude of a time duration with musical interval.

Take a circle and randomly choose 41 chords (meaning, sorry, line segments that connect two points on the circumference).  That makes 820 pairs of chords, but only above one third of the pairs will intersect (meaning, inside the circle).  Those roughly 270 points of intersection, plotted on a virtual piano roll, become the notes of a variation.  The piece consists of 10 variations.  Each note/point sits on two lines, so each line will contain an average of about 13 notes.  This is the emergent clue.  Depending on the slope of the line segment, it will sound as a chord, a broken chord, an arpeggio, a line slowly ascending or descending, or even a pedal tone.  Of course the points/notes on a line don't sit evenly spaced - their position gets determined by the random dispositions of the other chords.  But every note is overdetermined -- by design it sits on two lines and thus helps describe two different musical figures.

Empirically, the 88 note space of the piano (so 352 distinct pitches by the use of eighth-tones) feels like one minute.  Too much faster and the emergent shapes get compressed into illegibility, too much slower and the notes get unglued by the strain on short-term memory.

The accompanying graphic explores a similar construction, but in the visual realm.

Time-Space-Circle-Line-Point #7, for four pianos tuned in eighth tones

I am a British composer, who has studied composition privately with British composer Peter Nickol https://www.impulse-music.co.uk/peternickol/ (although I am largely self-taught). I have also studied piano (privately) with concert pianist Ekaterina Shetliffe. 
My music contains elements of impressionism, and musical modernism; I have also explored 12-tone composition.
For several years now, I have been developing my own composition technique, which focuses on the liminal area between stochastic and spectral music, which I intend to use in my future compositions.

Composers who have influenced me include Schumann, Chopin, Schoenberg, and Ligeti; however my formative musical inspiration is the music of Debussy.

*My music and poetry is copyrighted.*

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

Please don't spam this account!

Time-Space-Circle-Line-Point #7, for four pianos tuned in eighth tones

David Victor Feldman