My sonata for solo cello dedicated to and performed by Juan Aguilera Cerezo.

My sonata for solo violoncello ”Contrapositions” is a textural and a character study in eleven short movements. All of these movements focus on different and highly contrasting characters which then undergo an evolutionary process during the movement. One of the goals of this composition was also to try different expressive ideas and work with certain technical concerns regarding organization of pitch and rhythm. Introduction presents all the main ideas of the composition in an atomized and fragmentary form. These ideas will then later appear as their own movements, sometimes bearing only vague resemblance to their introductory counterpart. The title is borrowed from mathematics and logic, also giving some hint on the relation between certain movements.

Introduction
Pizzicato giocoso 
Adagio tenero
Furioso 
Scorrevole
Mesto e statico
Maestoso
Desolato
Feroce
Adagio tenebroso
Coda

Sonata for Solo Cello "Contrapositions"

Kazem Abdullah, conductor
Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra
August 2007 

Charles Wuorinen, Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra

Performed at the University of Leeds by the Marsyas Trio in October, 2024

Memphis Facula

Sketch 2 for Symphony No. 1

Conductor: Roger Redgate
Ensemble Exposé
BBC Recording, live at the ICA LOndon

Richard Barrett: Anatomy (1986) For 11 Instruments Ensemble Exposé, Conductor: Roger Redgate

STRAVINSKY - A SERMON, A NARRATIVE, AND A PRAYER.  L'Orchestre de la ORTF, Pierre Boulez, Conductor.  Johanna Peters, alto; Herbert Handt, Tenor; Sebastien Shaw, Narrator.  Live performance at the Theatre Champs-Elysees on June 18, 1963.

STRAVINSKY - A SERMON, A NARRATIVE, AND A PRAYER L'ORTF, PIERRE BOULEZ 1963 - 6-18

Stravinsky - The Flood, a Musical Play for Chorus, orchestra, tenor solo, two bass solos, and four speakers.  Lorenz Fehenberger, ten., Heinz Rehfuss, Hans Gunther Nocker, bass, Hans Herbert Fiedler, Fritz Wilm Wallenborn, Ingeborg Hoffmann, and Alois Maria Giani, speakers  Chorus and Orchestra of the Bavarian Radio, Pierre Boulez, conductor, Live Performance April 17, 1964.

STRAVINSKY - THE FLOOD - SYM. ORCH OF THE BAVARIAN RADIO - BOULEZ 1964-04-17

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)

International Ensemble Modern Academy 2017/18

Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst frankfurt am Main
09.09.2018

Brian Ferneyhough - Flurries

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

We live in strange, sad times.

Recently, for an utterly practical purpose, someone asked me the following question:  

12 people who need to meet by Zoom (due to the pandemic) would all like to get to know each other, one-on-one.  But to save time, they'd like to break out repeatedly into 4 groups of 3 (rather than into groups of 2).  How many times will they have to do so for every pair of people to meet at least once in some small group?

Turns out they will have to break out 7 times, but this means 18 pairs of people will meet twice, so, while best possible, not a very tight solution.  

I sent them such a plan.

Then it occurred to me that if they'd allowed one break out into 3 groups of 4, things can work out perfectly tightly with just 5(=4+1) break outs total..

And then I thought, what if I treated pitch (classes) as the people?  

That makes the groups of 3 into trichords, 4 each from the 4 breakouts into 4 groups of 3.  So then it would seem nice to have all  16 trichords harmonically distinct (even up to transposition, which makes trichords come in 19 possible flavors total).

It turns out that there exist only 20 basic ways (of assigning pitches to people) that accomplish this. 

One of those forms the floor plan of this piece.

But also on my mind: a friend recently lost a close family member. I felt very sad to learn that the pandemic will prevent his relatives from actually gathering, so they have planned a Zoom memorial.   

And so, as I worked on this piece, I began to conceive it as a strange kind of funeral march, albeit without meter or tonality.  Thus  I dedicate it to the memory of all we have lost and will lose in this worldwide catastrophe.

Zoom Memorial, for piano

I am a composer, currently studying mathematics

Sketch 2 for Symphony No. 1

Teemu Heinonen

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Utsyo Chakraborty

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