Re: fractal music (was Re: keeping loops interesting)

["Jon Southwood" <jsouthwood@gmail.com>]

Aren't you the project leader on the CT-TwelveTone Dance project? :)

Anyway, just like 12-tone technique, it only seems that way until it becomes synthesized into your technique.

"...letting principle take hostage of my creativity and compositions..." is a matter of perspective. Pre-compositional designs and manipulations of basic materials have been the norm for Western Art music composers for centuries. Josquin des Pres composed a piece where the formal proportions were meant to be directly analogous to the proportions of a particular cathedral. Beethoven's notebooks are full of his various manipulations of basic building-blocks. His rigor provided a model that was hardly matched by even the adherents to post-WWII serialism. There are two ways of looking at preconceived designs: limiting or freeing. I personally often find that self-imposed limitations can often force me to be *more* creative than when I give myself carte blanche. I often find that carte blanche results in a lot of self-indulgence at the listener's expense (both in my own and in others music).

So, anyway, don't wanna start a huge debate on the merits of such things....but you asked for a concrete example...so I gave ya one. ;-)

(Incidentally, the compositional system devised and taught by Joseph Schillinger involved a lot of recursive processes in the development of a compositions most basic materials as well as variations/transformations of them. Probably the most well-known student of  Schillinger was George Gershwin whose "Porgy and Bess" is a textbook example of rigorous application of Schillinger's system. Few would argue that Porgy and Bess sounds like its composer was a slave to its mathematically preconceived design....just some food for thought.)

Cheers,

Jon

On 9/21/06, Krispen Hartung <khartung@cableone.net> wrote:

Geeeesh, this reminds me of composing my first 12 tone composition, generating my row, matrix of permuations, etc...sheer hell. For me, there's nothing so miserable as letting principle take hostage of my creativity and compositions, like being a slave to mathically preconceived design....essense preceeds being, vs. being proceeds essense....the anti-thesis of healthy existentialism.

 

K-