Palestra com Michael Winter - Shape and Structure: a few good ideas on form and detail

Palestra com Michael Winter
Shape and Structure: a few good ideas on form and detail
Dia 12 de maio de 2014, 14h00
Sala 12 do Departamento de Música

Michael Winter is a composer, music theorist, and software designer. He co-founded and directs the wulf., a non-profit arts organization that presents music free to the public in los angeles. Michael is a firm believer in music making as an exploratory process and free information; e.g. open source code, free music, etc.

Shape and Structure: a few good ideas on form and detail
In his seminal theoretical work, Meta+Hodos, James Tenney defines form as shape and structure; the former being the morphology of musical parameters/elements over time and the latter being the interrelation between elements irrespective of time. Tenney's compositional process acted as a laboratory for his pursuit to understand "how we hear". This resulted in an incredible array of well-defined compositional methodologies that are at once innovative, beautiful, and elegant. The works themselves invite the listener to enjoy musical experience as an exploration into psychoacoustics and the cognitive mechanisms humans use to deconstruct sound. In this talk, I will discuss Tenney's work and track musical threads that developed throughout his life focussing on his ideas on form and the algorithms he defined to elucidate form within his own work. I will also compare and contrast Tenney's ideas to those of Tom Johnson, another composer similarly interested in shape and structure, but whose musical perspective and aesthetic radically differs partly due to Johnson's passion for recreational mathematics, combinatorial design, and graph theory. I will conclude by discussing the impact and influence of both Tenney and Johnson on younger generations of composers such as Larry Polansky and myself who have augmented/extended their ideas by incorporated them with other interests such as optimization (searching software/solutions spaces) and algorithmic information theory.