Denis Lorrain

Construction 040

Treize miniatures en formes de galaxies

Algorithmic composition for MIDI piano

(2010, total duration: *ca.* 23 mins)

Programme Note

   After many years of silence, I settled a different attitude towards musical composition, taking into account my real position, and guided by the hope of a liberating myself from multiple constraints and conventions. An aphorism by Joan Miró fostered me in this direction: "Some may say that this is not painting, but I don't give a damn".

   This new approach concretised in what I have entitled Musical Constructions. With minimal and self-produced means, I make use in those pieces of reduced and well characterised algorithmic processes, but in a very free manner, which I could call intuitive and expressive. I easily accommodate to such an oxymoron—this conflictual opposition constitutes the heart of the endeavour. Would they rather be musical experiments?

   Some fruits of this approach reveal themselves as arduous, difficult, even a-musical (Constructions 038 and 039). They develop excessively long forms, inclined toward aridity because of the extreme reduction of means. In those cases, the crucial opposition between algorithm and intuition is clearly at odds with expressivity.

   Others, such as the Construction 037 Gryllibus and the Construction 040 Treize miniatures en formes de galaxies, on the contrary, reverse this opposition in favour of a certain musical expressivity and variety.

   The thirteen miniatures of the Construction 040 all stem from one single algorithm. Although simple in its principle, the process used imposes a large degree of abstraction of its control parameters. It simply consists in projections of points on axes, each representing one of the dimensions of sound events (date, duration, pitch, intensity). But the quantitative adjustment of these axes, thus of the incidence angles of the projections, allow an impressive variety in the morphologies of results, on which these short pieces give an insight.

   I had used differently the principle of varied projections of points on axes in the Construction 038 au Plan musical. But in a simpler systematic manner, and in very long time spans. In the Treize miniatures en formes de galaxies I restricted myself to short durations. To compensate, the structures of projected points are more complex, being fractal, and contrasting pieces can be multiplied thanks to their briefness.

   The set of thirteen miniatures consists in six pairs and one additional piece. I resorted to geometrical representations to guide myself in exploring the infinite possibilities opened by the abstraction of the algorithm. For instance, the two members of each pair have been conceived as "symmetrical" to each other—this symmetry being relative to one or more dimensions. In the sequence of pieces, the six pairs are nested into each other. The additional miniature, the thirteenth, of freer and independent inspiration, is thus naturally played in central position, in the middle of all the nested symmetrical pairs.

DLO

Karlsruhe

10/2011