This project started very innocently (which is to say, I had no idea what it would turn into [not to say I have much idea of what it will turn into from where it is now]) with some experiments in writing music. I started very far from what I am doing now with drawings that guided an approximate pitch for a performer to follow. That developed into the many systems of organization and all of the other things that this piece does now.
To begin I asked what is music? The answer (as its been told to me and as I believe it to be) is that music is organized vibrating air. The next steps I took were in the path of Boulez. I organized groups of ways to make air vibrate. I organized duration, pitch quality, and an approximate pitch scale that instructs to the performer to chose a note at will within certain combinations of notes. I serialized all of these things into chart after chart and I used different methods of organization for each.
First I conceptualized, realized and organized the pitch quality scale (seen in 1 [I will reference my original notes that are in the links]).
1 – pitch quality organization concept
The concept is that the performers get 8 different ways with which they are instructed to play the notes. soft dot, soft hold, loud dot, loud hold, soft to loud, loud to soft, vibrato, and trill (seen in 1).
Those qualities are then reordered into 6 groups of 8 based on a random sequence generated by taking digits off of pieces of trash (something I thought of while contemplating Cage’s methods of chance). Those groups of 8 are then put into groups of 4 by using the inverse, retrograde, and inverse-retrograde. this creates 6 groups of 32 which amounts to 192. This is done for each instrument (seen in 2, 3, and 4).
2 – pitch quality organization chart instrument 1
3 – pitch quality organization chart instrument 2
4 – pitch quality organization chart instrument 3
Next I conceptualized how I would organize the duration (seen in 5).
5 – duration organization concept
The durations happen in beat groups of 1, 3, 6, and 10 which on these charts I am representing with 1, 2, 3, and 4. I organized them into all of the different possible rows and then organized a system for selecting them. The system selects them in 3 groups of 4 each time. It selects durations in 4′s for each instrument and stacks them. It then does this 48 times to generate a string of 192 durations for each instrument (seen in 6).
6 – duration organization chart
So now I have these groups of pitches (chords?) to organize (seen in 7).
7 – pitch combination concept and organization
I know that each instrument can be in 4 possible states. silent, low notes, medium note, and high notes. I also know that I have 3 instruments. This means that I have 64 possible chords(?). To organize those chords in a way that isn’t just a gradient from one possibility to the next (moving from all nothing to all high) I must create a system to reorder them. To do this I assigned them(1 through 64) to cities in order of population (new york to anchorage [or something]). Then I reordered them based on population density instead of population to create the final 64 chord row (seen in 8).
8 – pitch combination organization chart
9 – Cell organization chart page 1
11 – cell organization chart page 3
10 – cell organization chart page 2
Here I took a moment to reflect on what I had done and think about what I was going to do. I took some notes on where I wanted the piece to go. This included a very important choice to abandon the idea of an approximate pitch system that allows the performers to make decisions during the performance. I realized that that would obscure any identity that the piece might have. By using reiterated sequences of pitches I would be able to better demonstrate how my piece functions. To do this I used the system that would have informed the performer of which pitch region to play in, to create a system for definite pitch choice. This system chose a pitch from 1 of 3 groups of 8 pitches that divided 2 octaves as a single group into into 3rds (see 13, 14, 15).
13 – final organization chart 1
15 – final organization chart 3
14 – final organization chart 2
Here I created what I thought would be the final version of the piece. It combines the pitch qualities, durations, and specific pitch chords. After some thought I realized that playing these organization charts would make an exhausting song that explored every possibility of my system in a way that might be boring. I wanted to find a way to explore the possibilities that explained more than just the form of the chart so I thought of systems that would show the way the chart functions and would demonstrate the identity of the piece.
16 – music organization ideas and concepts 1
I wrote notes on the idea and through sitting with the charts and thoroughly exploring how they worked I decided I would use the 3 organization charts in combination as a 3d matrix and I would write songs based on rules placed on that 3d matrix (see 16, 17). I divided the matrix into quadrants containing 3 layers 16 cells and created 4 distinct patterns for generating songs for each quadrant (see 18. 19. 20. 21. 22).
18 – first song organization idea
19 – second and third song ideas
The next step is to create a small version of each one of these songs. The idea is to and create a short and simple version of each pattern. Then I will write an introduction that explores a minimalist approach to combining all the patterns and a maximalist finale of sorts to cap the piece off. After that I will put it all onto a staff and give it to a trio. Violin, Cello, Guitar (maybe?). This should all be done by the end of week 10 at which point I will begin composing the visual elements of the project, that being the video and the direct animation. I am going to shoot videos of architecture and geography in Barcelona and make direct animation in the bask region.