Author: Pietro DJ

During the mid-nineties I was out of school, having taken an extra year and a half to study computer science while I figured out what to do with my life, and into teaching people how to use their computers along with fixing the occasional problem. One of the questions I asked during this time was “How much can I make this synthesizer do at one time?” Unlike a computer, which from the user’s point of view slows to a crawl while from it’s own point of view is doing as much as it can as fast as it can without waiting for slow people, a synthesizer never slows down — it just drops notes that have been hanging around too long when asked to play one more note than it can play. Electrons was my first foray into playing with the limits of a single synthesizer, and to cope with the limitations I designed a set of instruments each of which was monophonic (a single note playing at a time) layered into one performance package. As a consequence, the music came out rather classically-oriented when looked at a particular way. The most classically-oriented group languished for some time before becoming “Electrons II.” The cover art is the product of one of my early attempts to catch a lightning bolt on camera, which is far easier in digital than on film due to the number of frames required to catch what is essentially a random event.

“Prelude” follows no particular form, but listen for the initial theme as it appears in the different instruments in different registers.

“Interlude” also follows no particular form. Listen for the rising four note theme throughout.

“NoDance” is distinctly not in one of the baroque dance forms, and in addition switches between several odd meters, in an attempt to keep anyone from actually dancing to the music. Listen for the trills and tremolos taking advantage of the sliding nature of the monophonic synthesizer.

Sunrise Sonata: the beginning of home ownership. These are pieces written and recorded in my first home studio. To accommodate what I had available to me at the time, these were sequenced and then recorded in one take with my job being to pretend I was an automation system for my rather primitive mixer. The cover art is actually a sunset, taken somewhere in the vicinity of North Port, Florida, and manipulated in Photoshop to achieve a synthesized image reflecting the synthesized sounds.

“Night Begins” introduces the instrumentation: bells, strings, an old-school synthesizer, and a harpsichord. Listen as the cold harpsichord of night gradually takes over.

“Midwinter” is a collection of five themes in a minimalist style. The themes are connected using a Gray code, which is a binary numeration system in which increasing a number by one changes exactly one bit. In “Midwinter” the code is expressed by turning on or off one of the themes.

“Freeze/Thaw” is the darkness of strings taking over the lightness of bells. Listen for the bells to change character, taking on the dissonances of the strings over time.

“Warmth” comes alive with the optimism of new light. The majority of the piece was sketched out on a piece of scrap paper over Thanksgiving dinner at my Dad’s place.

Number Study: a few pieces written for a Music Theory class and inspired by numbers in some way. I had not yet reached the fruition of my love for math, but this was when I first realized there were deeper connections between math and music than were immediately obvious. The cover art has a collection of four prime numbers surrounding a composite number that has been struck out. The assignment was to write one piece of music to demonstrate a straightforward association between numbers and music, and as was usual for me, I wrote several and turned in my favorite. “Timelessness” was performed at a student recital in the spring of 1988.

“One/Eight” revolves around a sequence of time signatures repeating the pattern {1/8, 2/8, …, 7/8, 8/8; 8/8, 7/8, …, 2/8, 1/8 }. The pitches are less important than the patterns. In this example, the numeric association is strictly the counting of the time — but listen for the one instrument that ignores the time signature specified by the measures.

“Timelessness” is the opposite: a series of chords explicitly not to be played in time, and written out as instructions to the performer involving statements like “when one performer wishes to move to the next chord…” and the like. The score is very efficient — one page contains three minutes of music for a sextet, and each performance of it should vary widely. For this piece, the numeric aspect was in the absence of indications of duration or tempo.

Last, “Primes” uses a series of pitch classes the components of which multiplied together define tempi. Pitch classes are interesting objects: since western music is based on a 12-note scale, arithmetic mod 12 is very useful. The pitch class theory involves reducing a set of notes to a particular form, with the notes clustered as best as possible at the “bottom” of the scale presumably to make it easier to compare pitch classes and do some of the other (more interesting) analyses. I used a series of pitch classes involving only prime numbers (2,3,5,7,11), and took those values into meaning tempo as well as pitch. Notice that when the tempo changes, so does the character of the implied harmony.