Systems of Musical Thought
Graduate Seminar
Larry Polansky
Music 105, Dartmouth College
Winter, 2001
 

First project
required of all students, first week of class

due, Thursday, January 18th, in class

  1. Write a short theoretical description of a program, and a piece, with an a priori compositional idea that describes the structure, generation, and "point" of the piece. It must be as fully articulatible as possible, and this description must precede the piece.
  2. Write a program, in Java/Jsyn, to compose this piece. The program should do as much as possible on its own (avoid "note lists," samples which create too much of their own context, etc.). The piece should be about the form of the program, the program should not be an ancillary part of the aesthetic experience.
  3. In other words, what we hear should clearly express what the program is doing, not some kind of ornamented version, or some complicated mapping of the program in which the actual theoretical ideas are blurred, distorted, or significantly transformed. This does not mean that the piece need be raw, ugly, dull, overly-intellectual, etc. It just means that you should concentrate on designing a theoretical algorithm which in and of itself produces something musically interesting (to you, and us).