JI piece From: Christopher Bailey

> http://works.music.columbia.edu/~chris/aftermath.mp3
> 1/1 21/20 9/8 7/6 5/4 21/16 11/8 3/2 13/8 5/3 7/4 15/8
> Meditation for concrete sounds and processed strings.
>
> Posted by: "Kraig Grady" kraiggrady@... banaphshu
> Sat Jul 15, 2006 4:58 pm (PST)
>
> mysterious and quite compelling.
> interesting tuning like somewhere between the 12 Canwright and the one
> i came up with.
> with less repeated material at the fifth that either adds a tension that
> sustains anfd keeps it going

Thanks. . . yeah, basically you've got a solid tonic quintad (1:9:10:12:14), plus some 7-limit-related tones (21/20, 7/6, 21/16 forming a nice 8:9:10), plus the 11th and 13th partial thrown in for good measure.

I found a lot of nice sonorities in it.

> Rosencrantz: >
> know that you generally favor formalist techniques, does that trend
> continue here? I'd also like to know what concrete sounds you used,
> because I find they're provoking pretty strong reactions in me.
>

Basically, I came up with about 21 chords that I liked in the tuning, just through experimentation. then I put them into a smooth order, intuitively. then I filled out the progression, realizing it with some serialized counterpoint. In this case that counterpoint is realized by having 2 lines in each stereo position (right, middle, left), one of each line is un-processed, the other has the amplitude-modulation on it.

So you could say that the piece is half stream-of-conscioiusness intuitive, half formalist. But then, that's probably true of most formalist composing, with a few extreme exceptions.

>
> Aaron Krister Johnson
>
> Nice, beautifully done---very evocative! The sonic field in headphones was
> very rich and haunting.
>
> What's the equipment/software/soundfonts or what have you?

Well, the piece was first realized with MAX/MSP. I built my own soundfont, so to speak, using recorded samples from Mahler, Bruckner, and other late Romantic works with long, expressive notes in the string sections (one of my favorite gesture/timbres). The MAX/MSP stuff performs granular, or more accurately, "boulder" synthesis on those notes. I'm interested in using "dirty" samples, from live CDs --- uneven pitch distribution, differing amounts of tape hiss, or performance space noise; also, when a desired pitch is realized. . .often it will transpose a "nearby" sample, the way a pro sampler does. . but sometimes it will grab a far-away sample just for kicks. so you get timbral variety that you can't quite predict.

> anything about your compositional thinking/process here? Does the title refer
> to a post-global warming catastrophe? Post-nuke? Post bad acid flashback?
> Post-breakup?

I guess it's a cliche . . . but it could be any of those things. I'm not sure what it's about myself. I tried to make the concrete sounds very suggestive. . . of something.

You might say my programmatic model was Paul Lansky's "Things She Carried"--you're not sure what the story is behind it. Definitely a piece worth getting to know if you don't know it.