Astra Concert
9/22/96
Melbourne, Australia
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Eine Kleine Gamelan Computer Music
Daniel Goode/Larry Polansky
(1980; computer version 1995)
Larry Polansky, computer, guitar
Jody Diamond, voice and percussion
Bridgette Burke, clarinets
Michael Hewes, electronics
Members of the Astra Choir
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3 Anna Studies
Larry Polansky
Computer generated tape works
Study: Anna, the long and the short of it (1993)
Four Voice Canon #9 ("Anna Canon") (1994)
Study: baa baa birthday have you any star (1995)
Australian Premiere
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34 Chords, Christian Wolff in Hanover and Royalton
Larry Polansky
(1996)
Larry Polansky, electric guitar
Australian Premiere
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From Four Children's Songs
Larry Polansky
1979
The Astra Choir
I. The One and Only
II. Sir!! Not a Form!?
IV. Name Dropping
World adult premiere
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"...still plenty of good music..."
David Feldman
Computer-composed work, 1994
Larry Polansky, electric guitar
World Premiere
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My Monodies #2 for 24-tone guitar
Warren Burt
Computer-composed work, 1996
World Premiere
NOTES ON THE PIECES
Eine Kleine Gamelan Computer Music
Daniel Goode/Larry Polansky
(1980; computer version 1995)
Eine Kleine Gamelan Computer Music is a live computer realization of Daniel Goode's wonderful process piece Eine Kleine Gamelan Music, first written for his ensemble Gamelan Son of Lion, but also performed frequently by many different ensembles, and Goode himself on solo clarinet. I had always loved the intelligence, eloquence, humour and richness of this one page score, and during a collaborative residency at P.A.S.S/Harvestworks in New York City with Dan, I wrote a live interactive version of the piece which "realizes" the score, making decisions in more or less the same way performers would. Dan and I have performed this new version a number of times, and a CD-length recording is in process.
The software was written in HMSL, and is available in the public domain as a stand-alone application (with manual and score) at my website (along with a number of other free MIDI applications, including the children's music software Anna's Music Box):
http://music.dartmouth.edu/~larry/
(LP)
Three Anna Studies
Study: Anna, the long and the short of it (1993)
Four Voice Canon #9b ("Anna Canon") (6:7:8:9) (1994)
Study: baa baa birthday have you any star (1995)
All three of the Anna studies were realized at the Bregman Electronic Music Studios, Dartmouth College, and alluse the voice of my daughter Anna Diamond Polansky, recorded binaurally, at ages 6 months, 3-4, and 4 1/2 respectively. The third study also uses the voice of Eleanor Wilson, age 4 1/2.
Study: Anna, the long and the short of it
:54 seconds long
Study: Anna.... makes use of a very short binaural recording of a single cry, including preliminary inhale, of my daughter Anna at age six months, in a bad mood. That sound, and portions of it, were pitch-shifted and time-stretched using Tom Erbe's Soundhack program to produce this piece.
Study: Anna... appears on the CD The Aerial #6, from Non Sequitur Recordings.
Four Voice Canon #9b(6:7:8:9)
("Anna canon")
4:02 minutes long
Four Voice Canon #9 is a set of short tape pieces made using five vocal sounds of my four year old daughter Anna as the source. FVC#9 is a set of mensuration canons in the manner of my eight previous Four Voice Canon s (1975-present), and is composed using my computer language HMSL (co-authored with Phil Burk and David Rosenboom). FVC #9 uses HMSL to generate a Csound score, which is then used in conjunction with Soundhack to create the canon. The Csound score is for one voice only, and determines the permutation list of each voice (the permutations are by a kind of "closest neighbor" algorithm), as well as detailed panning, durational, and loudness information. The mensuration canon is a strict one of pitch- and time-compression, and is generated in Soundhack. Each of the four versions of the piece is the same, except for the superparticular duration and pitch ratios used for the four voices, which are: a: 4-5-6-7, b: 6-7-8-9, c: 8-9-10-11, and ø: the golden mean.
Study: baa baa birthday have you any star
1:44 long
Study: baa baa birthday ... uses the voices of my daughter Anna Diamond Polansky and her friend Eleanor Wilson, at around age 4 1/2. Recordings of them singing "Happy Birthday" (to each other), "Baa Baa Black Sheep," "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," and "Puff, The Magic Dragon," were morphed into each other in a wide variety of ways using my own spectral mutation functions implemented in Tom Erbe's Soundhack. I was particularly interested in morphing their names, said by each other in their renditions of "Happy Birthday..." All the sounds in this piece are the results of these mutation functions.
Study: baa baa birthday ... is forthcoming on theComputer Music Journal CD, 20th Anniversary Issue.
(LP)
34 Chords, Christian Wolff in Hanover and Royalton
Larry Polansky
1995
34 Chords, Christian Wolff in Hanover and Royalton, is an "orchestration" of Morton Feldman's choral work Christian Wolff In Cambridge (1963), inspired by the famous "lost electric guitar piece" that Feldman wrote for Christian. 34 Chords... was written to celebrate my friend and colleague's 25 years at Dartmouth College, and is dedicated to him with the greatest respect for his work and ideas.
(LP)
From Four Children's Songs
Larry Polansky
1979
The Four Children's Songs were written as musical and improvisational excercises for elementary school kids. They are dedicated to my daughter, Anna Diamond Polansky, though they were written 11 years before she was born. They are published in the Frog Peak Anthology (1992), and have been used in a number of classrooms. This performance by Astra is the first concert performance of them. The text of the three pieces done tonight is.
I. The One and Only
With your instrument or your voice, make a sound, but make sure you make it when no one else is making theirs. Your own sound must cover up nothing but silence. Make it a loud, beautiful, hello-to-the-world sound. Make it only once. Before and after you make your sound, listen to everyone else's. When everybody has made one sound, this song is finished. What can you learn about a person from the sound they make?
II. Sir!! Not a Form!?
Take a short simple tune, one that your teacher has made up perhaps, and everybody learn to play or sing it. When this is done, play and sing it together in unison until you feel like changing it, just a little.
Do so! And keep changing it, little by little, until it no longer sounds like one tune, but lots of beautiful tunes, all at once, that everybody has made up by themselves.
Listen carefully!! Can you hear that all these tunes come from just one? Now, slowly start shaping your new tune back into the original. Listen to the others do the same. Soon, all there is is the first tune. We're back, and the song is finished.
IV. Name Dropping
Very softly, try to find the melody of your own name. Sing it, quietly and slowly, as if to yourself. Listen carefully. Gradually, get louder, but as you do, listen to everyone else's nametunes. After a while, find one that you particularly like and sing it. When everybody's name is being sung by someone else, the song is over.
(LP)
My Monodies #2 for 24-tone guitar
Warren Burt
Computer-composed work, 1996
This piece was written for Larry Polansky. I realized that the 12-tone frets on the guitar fingerboard made many microtonal scales possible if one simply detuned
the guitar's strings. Monody #2 is in 24-tone equal temperament, made by
detuning 3 strings down 1/2 of a semitone. Many other equal temperaments
would be possible in this way: 8,9,16,18,20,24,30,36,48,60,72 tone tunings
are all possible.
This piece should be played softly, combining the timbral sweetness of Jim Hall or Earl Klugh with the meditative calm of Erik Satie or John Cage.
This piece was written using a computer program which selected
different intervals, all of which were close to the pure intervals
of the harmonic series. Each phrase uses a maximum of four intervals.
Both pieces are a series of random walks around a particular harmonic
world, with each walk beginning and ending at the same place &emdash; the
lowest "E" on the guitar.
(WB)
[My Monodies and "...still plenty of good music..." will be recorded as part of a forthcoming CD I am curating for the Leonardo Music Journal, focussing on "post intentional" music (LP)]
"...still plenty of good music..."
David Feldman
Computer-composed work, 1994
David Feldman is a professor of mathematics at the University of New Hampshire. I first met him and his music in the early 1980's when I was a guest of Alvin Lucier's graduate seminar in composition at Wesleyan University. David was sitting in on the class, and I was astounded by the wealth of computer-composed work he had done &emdash; a body music which was austere, focussed, and in its own way, brilliant and unique. As far as I know, David's music has never been "performed" by humans, he has always realized it directly from algorithm to digital sound. After a number of years of gentle requests, David gave me two scores for "guitar," although they could certainly be played by anything with the appropriate range. The performer's challenge (and delight) in these pieces is to take an apparently "raw" list of notes in time, for which the generating algorithm for which may or may not be understood, and re-compose the information to the instrument. The score's coherence and logic is one thing, the performer's another.
(LP)