teaching-composition

Re-working the generated part: Before I get to orchestrating the cello solo, I decided I need to re-work the generated line. The previous line (ex.1 below) wasn't too practical, and didn't give the cellist enough leeway to work with the prepared-string to bring out the desired sounds: the whole point here is that the preparations allow for different harmonics and multiphonics to emerge, and that the tablature-style notation constrains the player's actions to limit what specific sounds emerge. Ex.1: cello solo v1 (notation explained below) In the notation (as explained in earlier post ) there's a 6-line stave to indicate not pitches but bow positions, between the preparation (bottom) and bridge (top); essentially sul-tasto to sul-pont . The part mostly only uses the right hand for playing, with the left hand occasionally used for timbre variation through interference (see b.143–145). To generate the part, I allowed the isorhythm (ex.2) to run for nine iterat...

It's been two months between deciding the system I'd use for this duet, and actually implementing it. Inevitably a few things have shifted, but it's essentially the same as described in the first post here . Part of the delay was laziness about transferring the stream of numbers into notes on Sibelius, which it turns out was solved easily by using the 'seq' object in Max to turn the stream of numbers into a midi file, which could then be opened in Sibelius. Easy! The other delay was in trying to work out how the notation would work to (a) allow the guitar and piano to be together but drift apart at times, and (b) still allow the ensemble to play over the duet without requiring the guitar/piano players follow the conductor too strictly. The delay was one of those situations where I decided to just let me brain work on it without me (mulling it over sometimes without actually thinking about it too hard), and then some helpful chats with other composers made it f...