Category: algorithmic compositionPage 1 of 2
My new piece for cello (Martha Bijlma), electronics, and Jean-Francois Laporte’s self-made compressed-air-driven instrument the Bol was premiered on November 19th 2023 at the Rampe in Hannover, Germany….
There is a clear relation in this question to an earlier post which offers a definition of art. I posed the question to myself in this form after…
Anyone who knows my work can guess that in competence was substantially made with my slippery chicken algorithmic composition software. A lot of free-form editing and development of score…
From the 18th-22nd December 2022 Trio Abstrakt and I rehearsed and recorded in competence in the Kubus of ZKM Karlsruhe. This c. 70-minute through-composed work was commissioned by Trio…
On February 18th 2022, in the stunning Red Dot Design Museum in Essen, my new piece for 41 consort tenor recorders and tablets was premiered in a concert…
On September 25th 2021, Susanne Achilles and I again performed Jean-Claude Risset’s Duet for One Pianist. This was a recapitulation of the 2019 concert at the Philharmonie Essen…
On January 10th 2022 Michael Pattmann premiered ma bell, a reworking of ma bel. For one beautiful bell and four percussion groups consisting of six objects each of…
The premiere of my seven rotations of seven for three (triple doubles) for three violas and electronics was premiered at the NOW! Festival on October 30th 2021. The…
Kla4 is a piece by Michael Edwards, Thomas Neuhaus, Dirk Reith, and Günter Steinke for four self-playing pianos, e.g. Yamaha Disklaviers, as in the video below. Kla4 was…
On June 11th 2021 at the RüBühne, Essen, Ensemble S201 gave the premiere of the sixth installment of my hyperboles series before repeating the concert on August 12th…
Over the spring and summer of 2020, my students and I worked on new pieces for the MIDI-controllable Kuhn Organ of the Philharmonie Essen. Some of these were…
On October 29th 2019 I presented one of the most interesting concerts I’ve ever organised. Along with my colleagues at the NOW! Festival / Philharmonie Essen / Folkwang…
On November 5th 2020 I discussed composition, improvisation, and performance with Salim Javaid in preparation for a podcast release for the ON – Neue Musik Köln Station. …
On September 21st 2020 I was a guest of Johannes Zink and Frank Hilberg at WDR Cologne. Johannes and I spoke about the Institute for Computer Music and…
Last October, Georg Waßmuth contacted me out of the blue to arrange an interview session in preparation for a portait broadcast about my career and music as part…
The title gold im bach arose from a discussion I had with Karin Schistek during a trip in summer 2019 to Camogli, near Genoa, Italy. I had…
days with glass edges (chasing the butterflies in my wallpaper), for fifteen-piece ensemble and 4-channel electronics, was premiered at the NOW! Festival by the Folkwang Modern ensemble…
No, the image above is not my latest Max patch, though I can think of a few people who might recognise something there. Not Max: Lisp. If you’ve…
In May 2018 I was in Münster with edimpro colleagues Dimitris Papageorgiou and Karin Schistek to give improvisation workshops to students at the Hochschule für Musik. Mieko Kanno…
On July 12th 2018, Portuguese saxophonist Henrique Portovedo premiered HOTPO, my new piece for alto saxophone, ensemble, and electronics. The performance was part of the World Saxophone Congress…
Back in 2011, after several years of using either CMN or Sibelius (the latter via MIDI file import), I was considering alternative score output formats for my algorithmic composition software slippery…
Henrique Portovedo and I have just finished recording my piece in limine, for two soprano saxophones and computer, written 2003-2005. We’ve now got to work on the mix and…
First of all I should say that there are no current plans to port slippery chicken. But: A humourously intended (though sarcastic: you know who you are!) post on my…
Quasar Quartet, Le Gesu, Montreal, Canada, 19/1/17: It was disappointingly warm in Montreal. I’d promised Martin temperatures of -20C and below (it reached -33C on my last trip)…
Below is an interview I initiated online with the artists who made the above video to my algorithmic composition for rei as a doe. CI = Chante Inglis (animation)…
I’ve just returned from teaching algorithmic composition for a week at the Conservatorio Statale di Musica “Niccolò Paganini” in Genova, Italy. It was a pleasure to meet and work with Professor…
Those present at the St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh performance by Mieko Kanno of my hyperboles 2 (“until the cherries burst in the orchard”) on 20/5/16 were very patient. I…
Anyone who has input a piano score into notation software knows that it’s not so easy as, say, creating a woodwind part. First of all there are chords,…
Ellen Fallowfield and I outed the latest version of my hyperboles project last weekend at the Crosscurrents Festival in Birmingham. After two days of intense rehearsals and development it…
slippery chicken’s automatic chord sequencing algorithm creates an ordering for a set-palette’s sets (or chords) based on user-given dissonance and spectral centroid envelopes. The terms set and chord…
Back to part 1 auto-sequence examples and analysis The following examples process a set-palette created from a harmonic reduction by Emilios Cambouropoulos of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End…
jitterbug is a four-movement four-channel work/album for computer, with or without improvising musicians. It is documented more generally but in detail in another blog post. Here I’m going…
(aka four views of a rhythmic-structural procedure based on iterated proportions of 6:3:5:4) jitterbug is a four-movement four-channel work/album for computer, with or without improvising musicians….
Composed in 2010 but not released until some final polish was applied in 2015, Music for Parallel Consumption is a 4-channel digital composition made for delivery and playback via a custom…
No, this isn’t a polemic against complex rhythmic notation or the New Complexity. Since the 80s I’ve been a fan of such music, even if as a composer…
Update, January 2016: This project has now been released on bandcamp It’s a lovely word but a little overused by self-help and marketing gurus: serendipity. Those familiar…
Artists Colin Lawson and Chante Inglis are working on a video using Colin’s paintings as visuals alongside my 40-minute piano and computer piece for rei as a doe. This…
My hyperboles project saw a new iteration in Quebec last month. Performances of hyperboles 4 (“insomniac rain”) took place in Canada, on February 25th courtesy of the festival Mois Multi 2015…
Experiencing this sound installation involves stepping into a custom-built soundproofed box (the mNAP) and listening to the twelve-minute piece I made on stereo headphones. Simple feedback on the…
In response to Russell Snyder’s request for my code to generate double harmonics (natural) on the viola d’amore, I’ve abstracted the following from my piece 24-7: freedom fried….
Since August 2013 I’ve been working on hyperboles, a series of pieces that allow musicians to tweak the algorithm parameters that are used to generate the work’s score, sound…
Gianpaolo Antongirolami and I premiered my new piece for baritone saxophone and computer their faces on fire in San Marino on June 20th 2014. It’s 100% algorithmically generated, and…
My 40-minute algorithmic composition for piano and computer came out on the Aural Terrains label this month. Rei Nakamura premiered it in London (partial version) and Stockholm (complete version)…
On December 6th 2013, along with some colleagues and old students, I contributed to a PechaKucha evening in Edinburgh devoted to New Music. The 20x20second slide format is a…
The self-similar properties of visual patterns generated by Lindenmayer-Systems can be apprehended holistically almost instantaneously. Even simple rules can generate pleasing patterns of the sort you might see…
Rigobert Dittmann’s Bad Alchemy 75/12 review of my slippery chicken release has to be the best I’ve every received. Not because it’s the most flattering, but because the writing style…
A multi-format, surround and stereo recording of five of my compositions made with slippery chicken is now available for order or download. Made possible by a grant from the…
In 2009 I was approached by the editor of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery—the world’s oldest computer science journal apparently—to write an article on algorithmic composition….
For Ensemble Aventure, Freiburg, Germany. The title of this piece is taken from the poem “Final Notions” by Adrienne Rich (1929-): It will not be simple, it will…
Essentially, “don’t flinch” for guitar and computer is a three-part mensural canon, but similar to late Mediaeval and Renaissance isorhythmic techniques, melodic material is repeated along with a…