Michael Edwards

Brownian Motion

Programme Note

Rather than referring to the kinetic theory of gases, Brownian Motion takes its impetus from a very well known American soul musician. It is an homage to this giant among musical performers. But the piece is not an imitation of the soul style--far from it. My own concerns and predilections in musical taste are very much to the fore here. Instead, it is an attempt to take source material that is radically different from my style and turn it into something that is very much my own, yet at the same time preserving some of the structural elements of the original. In particular, the rhythmic structure of the piece is wholly based on the structure of the source, though the pounding beat of the original is rarely apparent. Some of the pitch patterns of the source are also present in my piece, but at a more abstract level.

Primarily then, this is highly processed music with only snatches here and there that remind us of "real" instruments. The whole piece is concerned with combining interleaved structures that, overall, gradually move from one state to another, but at first seem merely to rub up against each other, hiding their identity, their goal, and hence their relationship to each other, and further, to the source.