ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND BILLION PIECES FOR PIANO AND COMPUTER is a generative, interactive electroacoustic composition comprised of an autonomous software system and improvised live piano performance. Commissioned by and dedicated to the pianist Conrad Tao, OHTB was given its NYC premiere in March 2020 as part of a series of popup storefront performances sponsored by the Kaufman Music Center.

Conrad Tao NYC storefront prem. of OHTB (3)

Conrad Tao NYC storefront prem. of OHTB (2)

Conrad Tao NYC storefront prem. of OHTB (1)

String quartet commissioned and premiered by Duke University's Ciompi Quartet.

Soleil Noir

A little electronic piece made from samples of broken instruments. The punning title (if you get it, you get it)is from the first page of Harry Mathew's novel "The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium." HM in memoriam.

Naples ultra

Dreamfall

Divine the Rest

L'Imitation du sommeil concert Les Passerelles 13-12-15

A Free Invention for George Pitcher

Into the Night

10 MES DE MAYO-SONGS OF A LANDLOPER

09 CLOSE YOUR EYES-SONGS OF A LANDLOPER

08 LET'S GET SERIAL-SONGS OF A LANDLOPER

07 IDUMEA-SONGS OF A LANDLOPER

06 FAT ON FRUIT, OR INTELLIGIBILITY-SONGS OF A LANDLOPER

A Song For Sinking

"Biloxi Anapanasati" was written in 2020 for the Else, If Else trio (Nolan Ehlers, perc., Zoe Markle, cb., & Benjamin Portzen, pno.) This is the recording of their July 2022 performance in Frankfurt, Germany. The piece features a long text that recounts the last days of John Kennedy Toole in the context of a breathing meditation.

Biloxi Anapanasati - Frankfurt 2022 Premiere

OUT FROM THE STRAITS
Jeffrey Edelstein

"s_traits" is an ongoing collaboration between Bill Seaman and John Supko.  It started in 2011 with conversations about generative music and how to make it.  The two quickly discovered that they had been independently exploring what might be described as the “uploading” of human creativity to the computer:  Supko’s work involved developing software that emulated his compositional process; Seaman was investigating how creativity could be codified and reanimated through artificially intelligent systems.

A narrative history of the collaboration between Seaman and Supko captures how they wrote "s_traits."  Their work together began when Supko gave Seaman the electronic track from a discarded version of his percussion duo "Straits."  Seaman edited this track into hundreds of tiny samples, many lasting barely a second.  These samples became the first entries in what would evolve into a database of source material for "s_traits."  Over the next two years, they added more than 110 hours of varied but complementary sounds to the database.  The new material included field recordings, analog and digital noise, acoustic and electronic instruments, cassette recordings of Supko’s juvenilia, recordings of Seaman and Supko playing the piano (inside and out), and soundtracks from documentaries made in the 1960’s and 70‘s.  

As the source material began to expand, Seaman and Supko increasingly focused on the technical details of using the computer to compose music.  The majority of the samples in the database were created with a series of software tools designed by Supko.  This software was also able to generate new hybrid samples from the existing collection.  It thus enabled both composers to remix–again and again–the work of the other.  The unpredictable results of these processes were added to the database.  

When the sample database reached its current proportions, Supko built a new software system that could navigate the many hours of music in the database, extract and recombine dozens of samples, and compose complete multi-track compositions.  The new system paired these compositions with fragments of a text Seaman wrote after the poem "Straits" by Kenneth Koch, which had inspired Supko’s earlier percussion duo.  (Seaman’s text appears in full on the album cover.)  But rather than leave the system’s compositions untouched, the composers treated them as first drafts, which they developed into the tracks on the present CD.  

In the end, 26 tracks were composed this way.  Both composers contributed 13 tracks, although Seaman and Supko do not identify who composed what.  The two sets of 13 are interwoven so that all the odd-numbered tracks belong to one composer and the even-numbered tracks to the other.  Every track begins with a text fragment, which also serves as a title.  Seaman and Supko plan to write a track for each of the more than 300 remaining text fragments.


Jeffrey Edelstein is a critic and Director of New Music at Crane Arts in Philadelphia.

Bill Seaman & John Supko - s_traits - 02 the clicking

Bill Seaman & John Supko - s_traits - 01 providing the mix

OUT FROM THE STRAITS
Jeffrey Edelstein

"s_traits" is an ongoing collaboration between Bill Seaman and John Supko.  It started in 2011 with conversations about generative music and how to make it.  The two quickly discovered that they had been independently exploring what might be described as the “uploading” of human creativity to the computer:  Supko’s work involved developing software that emulated his compositional process; Seaman was investigating how creativity could be codified and reanimated through artificially intelligent systems.

A narrative history of the collaboration between Seaman and Supko captures how they wrote "s_traits."  Their work together began when Supko gave Seaman the electronic track from a discarded version of his percussion duo "Straits."  Seaman edited this track into hundreds of tiny samples, many lasting barely a second.  These samples became the first entries in what would evolve into a database of source material for "s_traits."  Over the next two years, they added more than 110 hours of varied but complementary sounds to the database.  The new material included field recordings, analog and digital noise, acoustic and electronic instruments, cassette recordings of Supko’s juvenilia, recordings of Seaman and Supko playing the piano (inside and out), and soundtracks from documentaries made in the 1960’s and 70‘s.  

As the source material began to expand, Seaman and Supko increasingly focused on the technical details of using the computer to compose music.  The majority of the samples in the database were created with a series of software tools designed by Supko.  This software was also able to generate new hybrid samples from the existing collection.  It thus enabled both composers to remix–again and again–the work of the other.  The unpredictable results of these processes were added to the database.  

When the sample database reached its current proportions, Supko built a new software system that could navigate the many hours of music in the database, extract and recombine dozens of samples, and compose complete multi-track compositions.  The new system paired these compositions with fragments of a text Seaman wrote after the poem "Straits" by Kenneth Koch, which had inspired Supko’s earlier percussion duo.  (Seaman’s text appears in full on the album cover.)  But rather than leave the system’s compositions untouched, the composers treated them as first drafts, which they developed into the tracks on the present CD.  

In the end, 26 tracks were composed this way.  Both composers contributed 13 tracks, although Seaman and Supko do not identify who composed what.  The two sets of 13 are interwoven so that all the odd-numbered tracks belong to one composer and the even-numbered tracks to the other.  Every track begins with a text fragment, which also serves as a title.  Seaman and Supko plan to write a track for each of the more than 300 remaining text fragments.


Jeffrey Edelstein is a critic and Director of New Music at Crane Arts in Philadelphia.

Bill Seaman & John Supko - s_traits - 25 the hiding place

Bill Seaman & John Supko - s_traits - 26 at the end of the mouth

Bill Seaman & John Supko - s_traits - 03 the memory of a moment

Commissioned by Jeffrey Edelstein in honor of the 88th birthday of Princeton professor emeritus of philosophy George Pitcher, "A Free Invention for George Pitcher" is a piece of generative software that interweaves recordings of composer & musicologist Edward T. Cone teaching a counterpoint class at Princeton in 1973 with sampled acoustic instruments, electronic tones & the sound of the wind to create a constantly shifting sonic meditation on memory, serendipity & the passage of time. You can listen to ten minutes of the software in action here or download it from www.johnsupko.com


In "divine the rest" I try to generate serendipity through the interweaving of human expression and computer operations. NOW Ensemble plays minimally notated pitch material-single notes, dyads, chords, but no rhythms-according to a variety of strategies I describe in prose instructions. Their playing responds to the ever-changing sonic environments the computer creates through the manipulation of field recording samples, drones, fleeting sine-tone melodies, and fragments of spoken text. The texts themselves are generative: I recorded hundreds of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (most culled from an essay by Miguel de Unamuno) that the computer assembles into extemporaneous utterances according to certain grammatical rules. The multivalent title "divine the rest" was itself derived from this vocabulary. 

divine the rest

A brief excerpt of the guitar concerto I wrote for my longtime friend, French guitarist Jérémy Jouve & the Listen Ensemble.  Premiered in France in May 2015, "L'Imitation du sommeil" ("The Imitation of Sleep") was inspired by a short text by the surrealist Gaston Dehoy, in which a sleeper invents dream after dream to protect him from the sun in a "shadowless country." The music is therefore an hour-long series of dreams in which the soloist, Jérémy, is the principal dreamer, whose dreams are accompanied and shared by the Listen Ensemble.  Instead of a paper score and parts, the entire piece is controlled by a generative system I made in MaxMSP, which tells the performers what to play (and when), and ensures that each performance will be different.  This recording was made during the second performance on 13 December 2015 at Les Passerelles in Pontault-Combault, France.

L'Imitation du sommeil (excerpt 1)

Consisting of 8 brief, simple movements, "only a visitor" is inspired by the story of the Soviet space dogs. Between 1957 and 1966, a period when space exploration was considered too dangerous for humans to attempt, the Russians sent approximately 60 dogs into space. These animals–all female strays caught in Moscow–underwent many days of inhumane training before being launched on sub-orbital and orbital flights. Surprisingly, most of the dogs survived their missions, and some even returned to space on subsequent flights. A number of the dogs, however, did not come back alive or at all, dying gruesome and terrifying deaths in their cramped capsules hundreds of kilometers above the earth. It is the tragic story of these dogs in particular that "only a visitor" seeks to commemorate.

I wrote "only a visitor" in honor of the 40th anniversary of my music school, The Levine School of Music in Washington, DC. This is the recording of the premiere performance given by INTERFERENCE new music collective: Noah Getz (saxophone), Osman Kivrak (viola), Nancy Snider (cello), and Jenny Lin (piano).

The title "only a visitor" comes from an untitled 1962 poem by Robert Lax:

"are you a visitor?" asked
the dog.
"yes," i answered.
"only a visitor?" asked
the dog.
"yes," i answered.
"take me with you," said
the dog.

only a visitor:  1. o spaceman

only a visitor:  2. science speaks I

Consisting of 8 brief, simple movements, "only a visitor" is inspired by the story of the Soviet space dogs. Between 1957 and 1966, a period when space exploration was considered too dangerous for humans to attempt, the Russians sent approximately 60 dogs into space. These animals–all female strays caught in Moscow–underwent many days of inhumane training before being launched on sub-orbital and orbital flights. Surprisingly, most of the dogs survived their missions, and some even returned to space on subsequent flights. A number of the dogs, however, did not come back alive or at all, dying gruesome and terrifying deaths in their cramped capsules hundreds of kilometers above the earth. It is the tragic story of these dogs in particular that "only a visitor" seeks to commemorate.

I wrote "only a visitor" in honor of the 40th anniversary of my music school, The Levine School of Music in Washington, DC. This is the recording of the premiere performance given by INTERFERENCE new music collective: Noah Getz (saxophone), Osman Kivrak (viola), Nancy Snider (cello), and Jenny Lin (piano).

The title "only a visitor" comes from an untitled 1962 poem by Robert Lax:

"are you a visitor?" asked
the dog.
"yes," i answered.
"only a visitor?" asked
the dog.
"yes," i answered.
"take me with you," said
the dog.


only a visitor:  3. questions

only a visitor:  4. science speaks II

only a visitor:  5. interlude

only a visitor:  6. observations

only a visitor:  7. science speaks III

only a visitor:  8. in paradise

"Inland Ocean" is a four-channel, generative and interactive electroacoustic work comprised of two sections:  a dialog between a computer voice’s questions answered by the composer's voice supplying the Markov chain-generated responses, and a chorale-like section controlled by the sound of an elderly man's enfeebled voice.  Each quartet member makes his or her way through a five-foot-long part guided by instructions hidden in the electronic sounds.  A separate software mechanism stochastically chooses and combines ambient sounds from a variety of sources:  trains, wildlife, indigenous musics, and various urban environments, among other sounds.  These are comb-filtered along with the voices to emphasize the global harmonies binding the live quartet to the electronics.  


Inland Ocean

A new alto flute version of my 2005 work, "This Window Makes Me Feel," prepared for Due East (Erin Lesser, flute / Greg Beyer, percussion).  This version appears on the 2011 release "drawn only once" (New Amsterdam Records, 2011).

This Window Makes Me Feel (drawn only once)

Composer of acoustic & electronic music.  Sometimes I combine the two.  Also music faculty & co-director of The Emergence Lab at Duke University.

John Supko

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