Just finishing up a new piece (currently unnamed). First attempt at scoring by hand, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. Even if it has taken me forever. Thought I’d share some detail images:
Once the performance notes are written I’ll upload a proper scan.
A recording of 10 pages of the score to my new piece, Tide.
Performers Scott Mc Laughlin: Acoustic Guitar, Vibraphone, Timpani, Bass Drum Alannah Halay: Piano, Triangle, Cymbal, Floor Tom Oliver Thurley: Glockenspiel, Double Bass, Tamtam, Tubular Bells Alex De Little: Zither, Trombone, Triangle, Bass Drum James Lavender: Electric Guitar, Zither, Cymbal, Timpano Phill Harding: Sine Waves
Recorded in Leeds: 26th November, 2013
First rehearsals today of my new piece, ‘Tide’ for 6 players and 21 instruments.
A handy little tool I knocked up last night to round-off a generated harmonic series to the nearest semi-tone (and output as a named note (C,C#,D,…) to a .txt file. Written in python, give it a root frequency, and the length of the number of partials you want to calculate.
Spent the weekend reading analyses of Xenakis’ Nomos Alpha, so I knocked up a little hexahedral permutation program instrument. Vertices are parsed out as x,y,z and can be hooked up as parametric controls based on the hexahedron’s position in 3D space! Hooray!
Xenakis uses isomorphic permutations of a cube to order elements of a set using pretty standard permutations (rotate 90º, rotate 180º, etc). His process is much more based in boolean logic and set theory, but I took the basic principal ofusing the isomorphic permutations as parametric controls, but running in real time. So you can drag the cube about, or animate it, and it spits out a bunch of numbers which you could use to control anything. (ie. bow technique, dynamic, durations, pitch, or whatever digitally!).
A Thomas DeLio article on Nomos Alpha largely ignores Xenakis’ use of hexahedral vertices and looks at the set more simply: thats worth looking at:http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/843739?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102363132331
Code is here (albeit in an awkward, copy-and-paste-into-Max kinda format)