Temporal-dynamic networks in Max/MSP after Ockeghem's chanson 'Quant de Vous'.

Performers: Tyler Bouque, Isabel Crespo Pardo, Killian Grider, Caroline Nielson,  Nicholas Ottersberg, Kyle Quarles

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF8j_fq_wg4

Fragments 15.0-15.6 (Ockeghem Anamorph)

Simultaneously Follow Four Twisted Paths, for guitar

gravities I (2021)
for guitar, vibraphone, piano and ePlayer

played by Ensemble Soyuz21, recorded live in Zurich, mixed by Beat Keller www.lagerstudios.ch

gravities I

map/territory (2023)
for 4 instruments and electronics

“ […] ‘The map is the territory’ because we don’t have anything else but maps. We only have depictions or representations […|.” (Heinz von Förster)

The piece - an experimental setup - has a generative open form and no predetermined duration. The starting point of this work are 4 individual voices and electronics, each composed as a multi-dimensional matrix. This is broken down into individual electro-acoustic and instrumental fragments by algorithms and then newly reorganized and combined in various ways in each performance in different ways/evaluations - new forms, orders are formed (in several movements). Map is territory, territory is map.

played by ensemble soyuz21 / zurich 2023

map/territory (2023) - evaluation IV

Collide-O-Scope Music performs Robert Morris's "Per Se(i) Grave and Giocoso" for flute, Bb clarinet, piano, violin, viola, cello. (2021) Live Recording 3/26/23 at Renee Weiler Concert Hall, New York City.
Laura Cocks, Flute, Marianne Gythfeldt, Clarinet, Doori Na, violin, John Popham, cello, Marta Lambert, viola, and Augustus Arnone, piano. Ben Grow conducting.

Robert Morris: Per Se(i) Grave and Giocoso (2021)

Quartet, After Haydn

Eidos

Sabi

Robert Morris: Sabi

On a popular understanding, Schoenberg devised the twelve-tone system to enforce a kind of democracy among pitch-classes.  For example, here is Milan Kundera's unsympathetic riff on this theme in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: "One day a great man determined that after a thousand years the language of music had worn itself out and could do no more than rehash the same message. Abolishing the hierarchy of tones by revolutionary decree, he made them all equal and subjected them to a strict discipline: none was allowed to occur more often than any other in a piece, and therefore none could lay claim to its former feudal privileges. All courts were permanently abolished, and in their place arose a single empire, founded on equality and called the twelve-tone system."

One can approach Schoenberg's purported goal by means not involving rows.   One can understand this piece as twelve compositions played simultaneously, each involving a single pitch-class.  Each layer (or channel if you think of the pitch classes as akin the primary colors that make a digital picture) unfolds in a uniform rhythm, but each in a tempo different from the others.  The durations of twelve-pitch classes divide the total duration of the piece into parts as follows: 
12*79, 19*80, 14*81, 21*82, 16*83, 23*84, 
18*85, 13*86, 20*87, 15*88, 22*89, 17*90.
One can view the 12*79 notes for the first pitch-class as 12 cycles of 79 or 79 cycles of 12.  Dynamics and doubling bring out both ways to parse the whole span.  Structure emerges from the interaction of the dynamics and doubling in all twelve "channels."  The shorter cycles interact to project chromatic scales (with octave displacements) and the longer cycles to project cycles-of-fifths.   Pitch classes move from octave to octave only gradually, so the polyrhythmic structure induces little melodies that seem to repeat but actually morph constantly.

Channels (Not Your Grandparents' 12-Tone Music III)

Another piece which possibly parses as 12 simultaneous pieces, one for each pitch-class.  Unlike my previous effort along these lines, where a steady pulse characterized each layer, I've applied approximations to the mathematical object called a Cantor sets to make the rhythm of each layer clumpy.  This allows a variety of pitch-sets to emerge but with no hard boundaries between these "harmonies."

Of course a cantor is also a kind of singer...

Cantor, for piano (Not Your Grandparents' Twelve-Tone Music IV) (2019)

Icon, for orchestra 



score:

- Saturate a given sound space.


comments to the score

1. We understand by sound space any interval delimited by a frequency x and another frequency higher or lower than x. 

The sound space in question must first be selected taking into consideration the extensions of the instruments that comprise the orchestra.

2. The order "saturate" should be understood as an attempt to occupy all frequencies closed between preset limits (high and low).

To facilitate the implementation of this order, the instruments used in the orchestra should be able to play microtones.

2.1. The musicians should listen to the texture that is sounding, seeking to fill empty spaces, that is, spaces which are not already occupied by a sound.

The frequencies proposed by the instruments must be sustained for longer or shorter periods of time, after which one can exchange one’s sound, always obeying the logic stated above.

3. The order proposed in the score is impossible.

The musical space comprised within a frequential interval can always be further divided, resulting in the existence of new empty spaces:
The space cannot be saturated.

From the point of view of the performing musician, the work must be an experience of this impossibility. From the point of view of the listener, it is a long cluster with internal timbral exchanges.


The work should last long enough.


J.-P. Caron
2006/2009


.........................................

2012 version:
Claudio Cabral- guitar
Magno Caliman- guitar
Marcos Campello- guitar
J.-P. Caron- amplified viola and voice
Paulo Dantas- tenor saxofone
Rafael Fortes- tenor saxofone
Henrique Iwao- electronics
Rafael Sarpa- voice
Carlos Eduardo Soares- guitar
Felipe Pacheco Ventura- amplified violin
Felipe Zenicola- bass guitar


Mixed by Felipe Zenicola and J.-P. Caron

Ícone (2012 version)

Transmission (2002) for bassoon and electronics

Drew Flieder (b. 1995) is an American composer of instrumental and electronic music.

Quartet, After Haydn

Drew Flieder

Related tracks