My electronic music

2023

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)

The punny title alludes to my long interest in making music where pitches arise compositionally rather than precompositionally, so not where the composer commits early to a fixed scale or temperament.    The challenge then lies in achieve some harmonic coherence absent such an over-abiding framework.

I chose the simple "Columbia-Princeton" timbres to let timbre get out of the way and let the pitches and their complex ratios shine.  If that makes the piece a bit of a pastiche, fine.

Without Frets [electronic]

Elliott Carter explored an all-interval tetrachord in his first string quartet and an all-trichord-class hexachord in his Symphonia.  Teemu Heinonen, a brilliant young Finnish composer, asked if similar resources were available in quartertones.   I answered Teemu's question completely for all equal temperaments up to quartertones and a bit beyond.   I was struck by the all-tetrachord-class 10-note chord (or scale) (0 1 2 3 5 7 12 13 15 16) in 19TET.   The existence of even one such 10-note chord is still about 10,000,000,000 times as many as probabalistic heuristics (that work very well in most tunings) would predict.  So this chord strikes me a kind of miracle.  

Here I arrange all 210 tetrachords  drawn out of the miracle chord in a Hamiltonian cycle with each tetrachord disjoint from the tetrachord before and after.   Of course I needed some design to project the individual tetrachords rhythmically, so I've settled on a structure that echos the pitch structure.   Thus I've married each pitch class is a self-similar rhythmic/dynamic pattern that remains the same same if you double the tempo(save for getting a tad louder).  So these rhythmic patterns form a kind of circle-under-octave-equivalence just as pitch classes do.   Though the rhythmic/dynamic patterns for individual pitch classes have a metric/binary character (like standard subdivisions of common time), their tempos relate by the frequency ratios so 19TET (so powers of 2^(1/19)), creating great complexity in the interaction.  

You will hear that my choice here to make each tetrachord disjoint from its neighbors induces a slow breathing in the music; it suggests locally an inhale-exhale harmonic periodicity that actually dissolves as you follow the larger composition.  The self-similar dynamics provide both the shimmering background, the delicate middle ground, and the occasional seeming interruptions (which are actually simply organic to the whole plan).

Miracle I (My Travels Through 19TET-Tetrachord-Space, by leaps)

While the midpoint of this 6 minute work seems to feature a dramatic and unexpected gesture, that moment actually arises as the inevitable consequence of the very, very simple logic in operation from the beginning of the piece to the end.  Careful listening may reveal this logic.  (Hint: pick one particular pitch to follow.)

While  just intonation informs the  pitch structure, the inharmonic timbres only suggest the pitches that they theoretically project.  In fact no (synthesized) timbre here ever gets used more than once, thus evoking a gamut of thousands of distinct but interrelated pitched percussion instruments.

The Inevitable Unexpected

Antichain

Many people associate serialism with what late composer Humprey Evans III used to call "twitchy music."   Here I explore a novel serial technique for a music I might describe as protean or fluid.   

Rows control configurations of attributes rather than pitches or other simple parameters.   In particular they control substructural justly tuned harmonies and the evolving mixes of outputs of six different filters (related related to difference tones) applied to those harmonies.  The pitches matter...but the effects also relate to some of the more purely "sonic" music of our day.

Let the title invoke not only the various meanings of the English word, but the rather different sense it has particularly in Dutch.

Drift

The following may seem like a mathematical paradox: if you start with one dollar and, at a constant rate, gamble one dollar double or nothing, you will almost surely lose all your money sooner or later.  But the average time till ruin is infinite.

Here it's notes not dollars.  A bet either generates another pitch in the same overtone series as the original note (the fundamental of a note a silent parameter) or extinguishes the note.  If the bet is won, the new note gets its own fundamental, and in this way the music, in a sense, modulates.

If you listen I hope you will hear that music is more than the sum of its simple description.

I have realized this process many times, and each realization has its own distinctive character.  If there's interest, I'll add "variations."

Technical note...  Most realization come out very short or very long.  Using some mathematical ingenuity, I have jimmy-rigged the time till ruin.  The result is provably mathematically indistinguishable from running the process till arriving by chance at a realization of the desired length, but is also in a way a fiction, since the code does not actually simulate the narrative described above.

Gambler's Ruin (electronic)

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

Please don't spam this account!

Without Frets [electronic]

David Victor Feldman