Saturday, November 12, 2005

"Once, I finished a piece and didn't even know it..."

Not exactly, but absolutely as close as you can get virtually.

A while back, I blogged about writing fugues and fugattos, and I wrote a fugatto for that thread. Well, while the initial idea was for that mini-fugue to be part of a larger piece, it then occured to me that it might make a good first theme area for a larger sonata-process movement that the fugatto itself would generate. OK. So, that lead me to change the altered dominant sonority that ended the fugatto - and which implied that the region of the relative major was coming, but in the minor mode - to a tonic resolution. I did that to get ideas for a second theme area which I could "resolve" during the course of a larger work.

The very first time I listened to it, I said to myself, "You know, nothing else really needs to be said about this subject and answer combination." That's right! I looked at it and realized it was 101 beats long, so at 101 BPM it would be "The Minute Fugue": I busted up laughing. I appologize, but this is sooooo frickin'-me.

Page one:



Page two:



Of course, as a sixty second long orchestral piece, a "unique" approach will be required. I've always thought that the most logical place for fractal, self-similar schemata to be most purely and directly applied to music is in orchestration: The distribution of parts in a score. When I apply fractal principles to pitch without tonal/modal filtering parameters, I get garbage. However, if I take these patterns and apply them to the distribution of parts in a score, I get a kind of orchestral pointalism that is mathematically driven, and the repeating sonic color patterns very much agree with me in the same way that viewing fractal images does.

This is even going to be easy enough that a conductor with a - you know - human personality and sense of humor, might actually program it. Nah... most of them are on the "dark side"... I'm just a lone Jedi in the desert... WTF could I possibly know?

It's on my FileShare page as WIP_SSF.pdf/.mid, if you want a giggle.



"Is there a problem here?!"

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