(Streaming link below.)
Summary:
Music for Miniature Landscapes, for guitar quartet, was written in 2014 for the highSCORE festival in Pavia, Italy. I was returning to highSCORE having been invited to attend after winning the 2013 festival's composition competition.
The piece uses statistically generated fields, superimposed onto simple algorithmic processes and the occasional 'compositional' intervention to create complex but intuitable textures and progressions - at least that is the intention!
The work is characterised by long parametric transformations that cause the music to move between states: dense texture to monody, obvious to incoherent and so on. However, these states differ only in terms of the magnitude of the variables used in their generation and do not exhibit any boundaries or transitions: any state changes, then, are phenomena which are imposed ‘from the outside’ by the listener, as are the details of exactly what they are and when they occur.
As a listener I find myself unable to avoid this projection of categories, not just in this work but in general: in this piece, the processes and transformations are slow and linear in an attempt to investigate this phenomenon, though it is by no means the only lens through which to listen.
As of Summer 2016 Music for Miniature Landscapes is one of most performed works, having been performed in Italy, England and the Czech Republic.
The work is dedicated to Quartetto Apeiron, who gave the premiere and have performed the work several times since.
Performance History:
Quartetto Apeiron - August 2014, highSCORE Festival, Pavia, Italy
The Chimera Ensemble - November 2014, University of York, UK
Quartetto Apeiron - June 2016, Scuola di Musica, Codroipo, Italy
Quartetto Apeiron - June 2016, Forfest, Kroměříž, Czech Republic
Quartetto Apeiron - August 2016, Pula, Croatia
Quartetto Apeiron - October 2017, Nuovi Spazi Musicali, Ascoli Piceno, Italy
[The Ascoli Piceno performance was broadcast on Radio Belgrade 3, 07/12/2017, and again on Italian Rai Tre Radio on 21/01/2017.]