On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:09 PM, Kim Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On 15 Mar 2014, at 8:25 am, Platonist Guitar Cowboy < > [email protected]> wrote: > > > > So one could play you some Ferneyhough, say Shadowtime, and you'd be > able to score it on first listen? I know nobody that has an ear that good, > but then every person makes me wrong every day anyway :-) > > > Ha ha haaaa! I don't think anyone can transcribe Ferneyhough. Not even a > Watsonesque super computer. Why not? You could hook up any player's output to midi in some version of Finale notation program on a 15 year old pc/mac with the computing power of a cellphone today, and it would produce, with Ferneyhough accuracy a crazy looking score. No quantization, phrase by phrase, set a grid for meter to clock, do calculus and you could set up the appropriate environments to do this with moving meter, to a conductors feel, in any general programing environment, say in Max/MSP environment, in C, or consumer level sequencers and notation software of today like Cubase, even computer games etc. The difficulty is more in setting of limits and ranges for felicity conditions. But once this is set, any computer can do this; even increasing polyphony incorporating melodyne type programs. > The reason is, the music is utterly tied to the notation I think Brian would disagree strongly, saying you are taking things too literally for reasons I'll expand below. > - not the other way round, which is kind of more "natural" - in that the > sensory qualia of the sounds themselves arise in the mind first and are > then transcribed into notation. That's the traditional way. Yeah, but that's the point: "Shadowtime" is more concerned with mirroring the irregular spurts, jumps, and sudden stasis/suspension of thought and hallucinatory tricksterish irregular state of the "inner vocal/thought lines" or "the local geopolitics in my head" as I heard him say once, with constant shifts of frames of reference made explicit, while we seem to just dream them along, often without notice of huge shifts. I don't think he believes in or is aiming for "nature" and "natural", which is why I suppose the libretto and its Walter Benjamin theme are appropriate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvlq3ywfO7g "Opus contra Naturam" seems to indicate that these spurted flailings of mind are not natural in the classical, traditional, primitive sense... the voices burst all sorts of 1st person stuff, of data and code, framed thematically by Walter Benjamin's death/suicide, descent of his avatar into other worlds and doors, trippy stuff. Depicting too much high level partial chaos is an aim here. And sometimes that partiality lets something "classically total" emerge for brief spurts. > Brian does the reverse; he gets out his slide-rule and his pocket > calculator, ingeniously invents a way of organising a composition and then > lets the numbers produce the result. He doesn't even aesthetically evaluate > his piece; he just stands back and says "OK - this is what the numbers and > algorithms gave me. Because it's built by explicit algorithms, the result > must be accepted since how do you argue with a bunch of numbers??? ;-) > You don't sound like the mathmusician you mention above, so I guess that is the joke with the smilee? On the large scale/line he works as classically as anybody: rough sketch of line/states -> details. That there are narratives and appropriate expressive goals, not just some "arbitrary number's will", seems obvious, but I guess I am missing the joke. > > Yes, a bit of the false is very much what makes the truth/beauty thing of > music work. Music notation is only proximate. The fallible humans that play > it are so unreliable in processing those algorithms that - bless me! - they > seem to play it differently each time they play it. But strangely, that's > what listeners seek from the experience. Brian's music, played live > "suffers" from this as well, but he can always say " the musos didn't play > it well enough to render it accurately." > > He is that class of composer who writes computer-music for humans to play. > A Universal Machine using machine algorithms to design algorithms for other > Universal Machines to play. But they cheat in peformance! > What you interpret as "cheat", I see as a humorous challenge to approximate "best try". He'd be the first to admit that the score is part of the performance and that he wants its look wild; therefore choosing metres like compound irregular eights and sixteenths facilitates making things look like a non-trivial jungle. But for things like "Shadowtime", it is approrpriate because first person experience of consciousness is very dense, "irregularly spurted", and not really graspable by musical notation; so this is reflected appropriately in the score. Also, I think composers should experiment more with rhythms on rhythms on rhythms of different length. The infinity of polyrhythmic possibilities is something too many composers shy away from, because the even 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 s etc. "work" for the audience. "Cowards!" is a sentiment, I can understand from him in this sense. That he pokes fun about presenting his musical findings in exaggeratingly precise notation and detail indicates to me that he is aware of the relativity, but will still choose this ride. No concern for practicality in full favor of dense precision. Notation itself is primitive to him and frames differently the code problem of inner lines and voices found, not to mention its appeal to the experience of density in spurts of thought. PGC > > Kim > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. 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