cotitsalv

This is the first page.
It's not quite all there yet but it's going to have to do for now.

Thanks, hh. It's a pity I can't get any resolution between the pic on this forum page (which has alternate staves missing in my browser for some peculiar reason) and the VERY BIG one on the cotitsalv link ... But I can cope!

What sort of articulation do you intend when a (presumably) legato note is directly followed by a staccato note of the same pitch within a slurred phrase?

And don't ye fergit it!

That is indeed a strange tune, Mr Harmony. I've only just seen it. How did you arrive at those pitches, may I ask?

When writing for brass instruments I distinguish "unmuted (or unstopped)" from "no valves depressed" by using o and ø respectively.

This evening I finally finished the electronic soundfiles for the cello/piano piece whose score was finished a little while ago. That's almost 14 minutes of stuff altogether, in the form of fifteen "moments" which have almost no audible connection either with one another or with the instrumental "movements" they overlap and alternate with. Now all that remains is to write a little program in MaxMSP which will enable me to trigger (and stop) them from the keys of the laptop. I was originally going to use a keyboard but then it occurred to me that might draw some people's attention away from the instrumentalists when I won't actually be playing, just switching things on and off.

Thanks for that info. What's often underestimated is the amount of effort and imagination which goes into choosing systematic generative processes which give the results you're looking for, or, more precisely, which give those results as a particular case of opening up a world of possibilities which will include unexpected ones too. Whether something is "dry" or not of course doesn't depend at all on how intuitively or deterministically it was composed, which I find a fascinating phenomenon.


I might use the footpedal option later on, but for now I'm not really sure how much fader action is also going to be required by whoever takes care of the electronics, and since I'll be there anyway I might as well let the performers concentrate on playing their instruments for the first couple of performances.

As I said before, there's hardly any audible relationship between instruments and electronics (or between the different electronic entries). Two of the fifteen soundfiles anticipate and recall the central pitch of the following and preceding instrumental movements respectively. Some of them are audibly derived from cello or piano sounds, but most aren't. One of them is referential in that it uses a recording of the Schubert song "Nacht und Träume" which is the source of most of the instrumental material. The electronic sounds will be played back mostly somewhat more quietly than the sound of the instruments (which also more often than not play quietly). I've been thinking of them as different ways of articulating the "silences" between the movements. They are all raw unedited outputs from the processes I used to generate them, though, as with your pitches and durations, much effort went into choosing the right parameters so that what came out was (or included) what I was after (or improved on what I thought I was after).

Hm. I just wrote the aforementioned program in about an hour and it appears to work. This makes me approximately 100% certain that I've done something stupid somewhere which will cause it not to work as soon as an audience is present.

Indeed. Although it still isn't a footpedal one, it's a spacebar one. However it will be a simple matter to convert it when the time comes. I thought I'd play the soundfiles to one of my students this afternoon, and, sure enough, running them from said patch, I discovered one or two stupid mistakes I'd made in the programming, which gave me quite a feeling of relief.

Good luck with the doormat.

I've just realised I have a swarm of impending deadlines...
Good deadlines, but still slightly threatening nonetheless.

The nice thing about composition at the moment is that all of my current projects are for actual performers, and actual performances. I'm not writing for the drawer. I've got three performances coming up in the next two months (hopefully), one for 'live' electronics (it'll be a work programmed into Max/MSP, and performed on that just for ease of time, but later recorded into a definitive version), a companion piece for my recently premiered ensemble work written for students, and a new piano piece. I'm quite psyched up by all three works (though I have no idea what I'm going to do with the electronics yet - something to do with Tristan und Isolde probably...) and really looking forward to working with the musicians.