Hi all,

I'd like to share my new composition called O Ritual Da Sombra for solo tenor recorder and live electronics. Unfortunately I am myself a very bad recorder player, so I am still looking for someone to perform it live and record it. Meanwhile, what I have is a demo of the piece using a sampled recorder.

Cheers,
Gilberto

@gsagostinho Yes, that's what I was getting at: that if one realizes something on the computer, one might as well take advantages of the possibilities offered by the computer. On the other hand, your demos are certainly useful for competitions or for giving the interpreter a better idea of what he has to do.

I also agree that humans contribute something special to piece's performance. I'm just kind of tired of waiting/hunting for players at the moment. At least PD allows us to somewhat recapture the spontaneous element through its generative abilities.

And yes! I have heard some of these player-piano pieces from Nancarrow. I must confess, watching the video of the piano makes it a bit more hilarious. It makes Alkan's pieces look "easy" (i.e. playable).

For me, demos are a way of sharing what I am doing right now without having to wait for a performance that may well never come. They are also very useful for myself so I can check how the work is sounding, and this is really a standard right now: I don't know of a single composer that does not produce demos beforehand.

For me, the problem with creating music with a computer but using regular sounds (violin, piano, etc.) is an aesthetic one: the computer is simply trying to imitate something, and without a very strong concept I think these compositions almost always turn to be very poor or not interesting: they are not as good as real life performance, nor they are as interesting as an electronic work that really embraces the electroacoustic world.

And you find Nancarrow hilarious? I don' think that is actually his intention, I am pretty sure he meant those compositions in the most serious way. They have some amazingly precise accelerandos e ritenutos, as well as other aspects of music, and so it's not only the sheer amount of notes that makes it impossible to be played by a human being.

Still on this subject, these days I bought a CD of Xenakis keyboard works performed by a MIDI piano (a real piano which can play itself according to a MIDI track, so a modern version of Nancarrow's instrument). The programmer (or should I say pianist) made the rhythms as precise as possible, something that no human is capable of doing either. The result is really nice and gives a very nice light to these works that I adore: https://neos-music.com/?language=english&page=output.php%3Ftemplate%3Denglish-album-details.php%26content%3DAlben/10707.php

Cheers,
Gilberto

PS: regardless of anything, Alkan is still unplayable

@gsagostinho It seems Nancarrow transcribed a piece by Cecil Taylor? I could be wrong.... (Tee Hee).
David.

@whale-av I wouldn't know about that (actually, I didn't even know Cecil Taylor until you mentioned him). While I do listen to jazz once in a while, this is absolutely not my area at all

@gsagostinho Try this!
I was lucky enough to mix his Trio once.... a long time ago. It's as close as you are likely to get to "impossible:

It's as close as you are likely to get to "impossible"

Well, it depends on what you mean by that. When one is improvising, there is a lot of liberty concerning what is right and wrong, particularly when comes to rhythm. So yeah, someone can improve a super ultra complex rhythm which the same person would never be able to read from a score and reproduce perfectly (think of Xenakis, Ferneyhough, etc.). So there are degrees of impossibility, as well as types of it (e.g. a minimal work lasting for 10h might be literally impossible to play for most pianists).

Cheers!

@gsagostinho said:

(e.g. a minimal work lasting for 10h might be literally impossible to play for most pianists).

... well there's Terry Riley also, who's having his 80th birthday soon

@seb-harmonik.ar Oh, Riley's music is really cool. I programmed his In C for my thesis about algorithmic instrumental music. Pity that in that time I was working with Max

I know several who don't produce demos, myself included. Often, the techniques involved are hard to get samples for, the notation is handwritten and contains concepts which are difficult to convert to a computer language.

I would argue that Nancarrow's piece is the same as making a piano piece on the computer. It's the human element that makes live performances exciting, so a MIDI-piano performance should be just as poor or uninteresting as a computer-made composition that incorporates instrumental sounds.

The hilarious thing about Nancarrow's player piano is the technical premise, and watching those keys move up and down so rapidly on their own is very amusing to me. That doesn't mean the composition itself is or is not serious. I rather like the ending of that piano study.

Mr. Taylor is quite impressive. And Alkan is playable! People play his music... sometimes.