making sense of

Programme Note

Deutsch: kurz

making sense of ist eine algorithmische, oft besoffen-klingende Anspielung auf die Klaviermusik der Spätromantik bzw. freiatonalen Epoche. Dagegen gesetzt und hineingemischt sind Strukturen ganz doofen, plumpen, wiederholungslustigen, oft dreiklängiger Charakters.

English: short

making sense of is an algorithmic, often drunken-sounding allusion to the piano music of the late romantic or free-atonal epoch. Set against this and thrown into the mix are structures of a quite silly, clumsy, repetitive, often triadic character.

English: medium

Besides living with pianist Karin Schistek for now more than twenty years, I have been improvising with her too in a number of different contexts. Karin's consistent and colourful sense of harmony always struck me when playing together, so I wanted to highlight that in this piece. Though algorithmically elaborated, the harmonic material is derived from improvisations Karin made and which I subsequently notated and analysed. So although I can fairly assert that Karin herself would not have come up with this music, its provenance is at least a little blurred. But this is always the case with instrumental music, to a certain extent at least, given the overarching collaboration undertaken by musicians and composers across centuries.

To an extent all interpreters, as well as audiences, must make sense of the abstract structures a piece of music such as this proposes. Here in particular though there is an extra level of making sense of during the compositional process in that, after the harmonic elaborations and structures were complete, the rhythmic structures were then derived from my jitterbug algorithm. These are more usually quite complicated—as evidenced in, for instance, my Durchhaltevermögen for solo violin—but here they have been made sense of, or simplified, via quantisation methods. This leads to quite different music, something rather compelling when looking at music from the point of view of its presentation in and subsequent interpretation out of symbolic notation.

The subtitle of this work is all color must be one or let the world be done (there'll be a chance, we'll all be orange!). This was taken from the Gregory Corso poem America Politica Historia, in Spontaneity, published in 1970. The significance of the subtitle is apparent in several recent as well as timeless political contexts, but takes on renewed import in the hands of a particularly sensitive and synaesthetic pianist such as Karin.