Amniotic

Manoeuvre Acrobatique

TINY IMPRECATIONS

Three Romances for Orchestra
Composed between July-October 2023.

1. I lie here thinking of you [0:00]
2. I see a wild civility [4:59]
3.  When I die, I want your hands on my eyes [11:11]

Composed as a sequel to my Three Instances for Orchestra, the difference between these pieces and its predecessor is exactly in the title (despite the formal similarities: a moderately paced first movement, a fast second movement and a slow third). The Instances are more abstract in their content, besides being composed for a smaller orchestra. The Romances are more explicitly "amoureux", love-struck. 

I preface each movement with a line from a love poem. The first movement, based on "Love Song" by William Carlos Williams, is a yearning address from one lover to another separated by a great distance. The second, from "Delight in Disorder" by Robert Herrick, highlights the beauty of imperfection. The third movement, inspired by Pablo Neruda, brings the cycle to a full circle with death and acceptance.

Love Song – William Carlos Williams
I lie here thinking of you:—
 
the stain of love
is upon the world!
Yellow, yellow, yellow
it eats into the leaves,
smears with saffron
the horned branches that lean
heavily
against a smooth purple sky!
There is no light
only a honey-thick stain
that drips from leaf to leaf
and limb to limb
spoiling the colors
of the whole world—
 
you far off there under
the wine-red selvage of the west!


Delight in Disorder – Robert Herrick 

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness;
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribands to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.


When I die, I want your hands on my eyes – Pablo Neruda 

When I die, I want your hands on my eyes.
I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once more.
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.

I want what I love to continue to live,
and you whom I love and sang above everything else.
to continue to flourish, full-flowered.

So that you can reach everything my love directs you to.
So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song.

Three Romances for Orchestra (2023)

There are 362,797,056 ways to partition a three octave span into three aggregates.  Once you do so, reading each aggregate from low to high, you get three 12-tone rows.  If you further require that those rows feature at least 7 distinct interval classes, the 362,797,056 possibilities reduce to just 46.  One of those 46 possibilities plays the role here of a passacaglia-like chord progression.  

There are 144 ways to have three triads sit within the aggregate without any overlap.  Remarkably, one can cycle through those possibilities so that each step turns up just one new triad.  Such a cycle provides the figuration for the variations. 

The overall effect produces a counterpoint between two opposing notions of harmonic rhythm, one based on the cycle of aggregates, and one based on the the featured triads.

A Friendly Accord between Aggregates and Triads, for guitar

Composed in honor of Tom Johnson's 60th birthday and premiered in Paris and Amsterdam by ENSEMBLE DÉCADANSE at a two-part festival in celebration thereof.  

Music based on a finite-state automaton devised by the composer;  Tom Johnson himself was pursuing musical applications of finite-state automata around that time.

T'homage (1999) for flute, violin and harp (for Tom Johnson on his 60th birthday)

Sessions - Concerto for Orchestra 1981.  Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond.  Live performance following world premiere on 30 January 1981 in the composer's presence.  It's amazing to think that such a vital work was written by a composer who was 84 years old.

SESSIONS - CONCERTO FOR ORCHESTRA - January 30, 1981 - Boston Symphony, Ozawa

Another hypercanon piece.  

This time, from the mathematical perspective, beats get filled when their beat number equals the sum of a square, a positive cube and 6th power.  

Because the powers vary, the music keeps the counts on different instruments. 

The numbers to square get heard on the piano (with 1 the top key and then descending chromatically).

The numbers to cube get heard on pizzicato strings tuned in 19-TET, using an ascending scale that divides three octaves into 19 equal intervals which sound as nearly 10:9 rations.

The numbers to raise to the 6th power, never more than 4, map to a small gamut of tuned drums.

The complexities of the sets of sums of just two kinds of powers asserts itself as the irregular staggered entrances of the canon on the instrument associated with other power.  

If this is too much information for you, the bottom line is an intense listen which, white it has a hypersimple underlying concept, also feature a rather complex surface regardless, and because of the density of the beat numbers with a "yes" answer, intense but also unfamiliar syncopation. 

Big thank you to Peter Thoegersen, who literally wrote the book on polymicrotonal (and polytempic) music.  He's a genius and you should check out his music.  While his music and also his working methods are quite different than mine, he has opened me up to one of his great discoveries, namely that the listening mind can instinctively decouple the layers of a complex music according to the tuning systems girding each layer (at a given moment).  The effect is like passing to an experience in a higher dimension, akin to the discovery of perspective in visual art.   I'm not sure Peter would even count this as "poly" since two of the layers are 12TET and my treatment of 19TET avoids actual microintervals.  But I'd never have come to this way of projecting my ideas without his influence.

Higher Powers, for Piano, Percussion and Pizzicato Strings

Program note by Jon Forshee:
Heraclitean Dreams (2008)
The aural delights of Joshua Mailman's electro-acoustic work Heraclitean Dreams emerge differently upon each hearing. Each time it suggests anew how best to hear it this time.
So far, to my ear, the global changes in sound color set the overall pace of this music. The choice of sound colors and their transformations linger in my ear long after each audition.  Recalling the opening pluck-and-vocal-fanfare when arriving at the end of the piece, it occurs to me that the sound color of the final pure wave sine tones, seemingly inspiring the work, lend this music its aura of cohesion, while the attenuations and tweaks to, and transformations of, this sound color give the work its shape. How Mailman transitions between these transformations fuels the action of the piece, and though these transitions (usually) feel subtle throughout, the cumulative sound color tweaks and adjustments with which Mailman achieves these transformations move my ear to listen softly...a zoomed-out kind of listening wherein local details flocculate into larger musical figures and draw my ear to increasingly broad musical gestures and stances. In this way, my ear traces the flow of one sound color into the next, and luxuriates surprisingly in the more unabashedly palpable sound color changes: around the 5-minute mark, the ear encounters for the second time the opening pluck-and-vocal-fanfare (though re-framed this time around); or the 8:15 mark, where the smooth profile of earlier sound color transitions seems to crystallize in a brazen rhythmic figure outfitted with a successive iteration of higher and higher frequencies at shorter and shorter durations--here the music relishes in the unsullied exuberance of the sine wave, and again the field of listening suddenly sounds broader. This music suggests many more ways to listen, and I do not feel compelled to privilege any one of them over another...with no single way to listen to Heraclitean Dreams, multiple listenings ought to feel rewarded with new ways of engaging the piece, and so far I have not heard the work the same way twice. 
—Program note by Jon Forshee

Heraclitean Dreams (2008)

Phalanges, for Harp solo (1995) - program notes
The title "Phalanges" refers to the fingers' bones, the very skeleton of the player, the subcutaneous motor skills that underlie the act of playing/touching the strings. Compositionally, there are three main ideas that intersperse in this piece:
1) The ergonomic or motoric one, referring to the way the hands accommodate the technical demands of the instrument; 
2)The Rhythmic ‘sculpting,’ referring to the interaction of complex rhythms and the use of my system of Micro-Metric Modulation, a mathematical way to link very complex rhythms/ratios through common denominators speeds; 
3)The use of extended-techniques dividing the harp into three different sonic regions in which the middle one employs a cloth/paper that mutes the pitches subsequently creating a kind of timbral asymmetry in the sonic presentation of the instrument.
First, the ergonomic aspect: the creation of motives and themes in this piece are a direct result of the very patterns of the player's hands/fingers. New sonic material emerges as a result of the dislocation of the hands throughout the harp. This is accomplished in two ways: a) When the harpist stretches hands widening or contracting the gaps between fingers while maintaining similar fingerings’ patterns - thus, creating small melodic distortions; b) Through the mere pedal- retuning of the strings providing a diverse melodic or harmonic contour for similar hands' patterns; Even if the fingers’ patterns are not “thematically audible,” (since they only refer to the techniques that propel the sounds) they acquire, nevertheless, the status of "articulatory themes" being as important as the audible ones.
Second, using a mathematical way to mediate between two adjacent rhythms through a system I developed called Micro-Metric Modulation. Although complex rhythms can be very demanding to execute it is possible to imagine an effective rhythmic bridge that is common to two adjacent and differing rhythms or ratio configurations. This approach is based on commutative and associative properties and is derived from Elliott Carter’s polyrhythmic ideas, but in a “compressed” way. It is fully developed on my Doctoral Thesis from 1997-8 (Micro Metric Modulation: New Directions in the Theory of Complex Rhythms), although uses of it on my own music are anterior to the thesis itself).
Third, employing a series of devices (paper between strings, tuning fork, constant pedal glissandi, half-pedal “buzz” sounds, etc.) I managed to destabilize the typical way of playing the instrument and the way it is commonly heard. More than seeking mere effects, I was “seeing” the instrument as a sonic (found-)object that could be “subjected” to different types of timbristic and ergonomic demands. Finally, studying the way the instrument behaves under certain rhythmic constraints it was possible to manipulate with similar flexibility pitch and noise (extended-techniques) zones. The theatrical aspect of Phalanges conveys its deep meaning: Navigating between the fingers' technical demands and its almost magic output (the music itself) the harpist questions the public with a bleak and distancing (‘Brechtnian’) look, as if saying, - “...where does music begin? And where it ends...?”
© Arthur Kampela 2014

Phallanges For Harp Solo (Performed live by Anne Bassande Zurich, 1995)

Greenbaum more venerable canons

More Venerable Canons

Joshua Banks Mailman is a theorist, analyst, critic, philosopher, performer, technologist, and composer of music, teaching at Columbia University, and previously at NYU, UCSB, U of Alabama, and U of Maryland. A graduate of University of Chicago (AB) and Eastman School of Music (PhD), he researches musical form from flux, temporal dynamic form and is published in Perspectives of New Music, Music Theory Spectrum, TEMPO, Music Analysis, Sonic Studies, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and others journals and books. He is co-chair of the Analysis of Post-1945 Music interest group of the Society for Music Theory. 
	He developed interactive technologies presented at the 9th Sound and Music Computing Conference (Copenhagen 2012) and International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) and European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) (Thesseloniki, Greece). www.joshuabanksmailman.com and http://soundcloud.com/joshua-banks-mailman

Heraclitean Dreams (2008)

Joshua Banks Mailman

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