A most beautiful performance with so much feeling, I enjoyed listening….

Infinitely Recursive Memory Palace Blues

Opus 65 Music for Children No. 3 Fairy Tale

STRAVINSKY - MOVEMENTS FOR PIANO AND ORCHESTRA. Peter Serkin, Piano, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Roberto Abbado, cond.

STRAVINSKY: MOVEMENTS FOR PIANO & ORCH. Peter Serkin, Piano, St. Paul Chamber Orch, R. Abbado, cond.

Bernstein: Sonata for Clarinet and Piano - rec. Nov, 23, 1943  David Oppenheim, clarinet, Leonard Bernstein, piano.

David Oppenheim was an early friend of Bernstein's.  This recording was made when Oppenheim was 21 years old and Bernstein 25.  Besides being a clarinet player, he was also director of Columbia Records' Classical division (Masterworks) for a decade.  Less well know was his marriage to two of his three wives. Wife no. 1 was the great comic actress Judy Holiday (Born Yesterday), also a friend of Bernstein's and a member, along with Bernstein, of the comic group The Reviewers (Bernstein was the pianist.).  

Oppenheim's wife No. 2 was Ellen Adler, who probably no one today knows.  Although she was the daughter of famous acting teacher Stella Adler, she is something of a footnote in the history of Schoenberg recordings as the soloist (!) of the first recording of the Ode to Napoleon with the Villars String Quartet and Jacques Monod for Dial Records.  Her unlikely connection with that performance was that this performance was under the direction of Rene Leibowitz and Ellen Adler at that time was Leibowitz' lover.   It is very strange hearing a woman (and a woman with a very light voice) perform this part.

BERNSTEIN - CLARINET SONATA, D. OPPENHEIM, CL., L. BERNSTEIN, PNO Rec. NOV. 23, 1943

Babbitt: String Quartet No. 4.  Pro Arte String Quartet.  Live Performance at Woolworth Music Center, Princeton University May 9, 1976

BABBITT - STRING QUARTET No. 4 - PRO ARTE SQ.  LIVE PERF. PRINCETON U. May 9, 1976

If a twelve-note chord features all the pitch classes, you can read it up to get a row. If the chord sits within three octaves, it can feature at most 7 different intervals (because 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8 =36).  There are just 46 ways to partition the 36 pitches in a three-octave span into three such chords.  

Each "variation" projects one of the 46 possibilities.  You hear each of the rows three times, but with the notes transposed into the three different chords.  

As with much of my music, there is no literal repetition, but also no attempt at "high profile contrast."  Rather the music invites the listener to attend to small differences, and in this case, exactly the small differences imposed by the universe or by the mathematics or however you prefer to think about it.  

It's hard to come up with "questions" like this, questions that indeed turn out to have a manageable but non-zero number of solutions. But having fixed such a question, the set of solution lies beyond human control.  The universe provides what the universe provides.  
This accepting of what I get interests me aesthetically, as does the privilege of having sufficient computer power now in the 21st century actually to discover all the solutions. 

Score on request.

The 46 Possibilities (Not Your Grandparents' 12-Tone Music VII), for bass clarinet

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)

Stockausen: Klavierstück 11 -  David Tudor, piano.  Live Performance Sept. 8, 1958. Darmstadt.

Chopin Nocturne in D flat major, Op. 27 no. 2

smulloni

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