Recording by Derek Muro
If the player above does not work, stream sans flash:
m3u playlist (iTunes, winamp, xmms, vlc, mplayer, windows media player, etc.)
xspf playlist (opens in any of these applications)
Program and Flyer (PDF)
Brendan Adamson, Composition
April 24, 2006 8PM, Morse Hall
The Juilliard School
The scores are available as SVG, PDF, and PNG (for some) files. The PNG files can be seen and heard together on the next pages. The PDF files will load in versions 7 or newer of the free Adobe Reader, but not much else. Adobe Reader has some aliasing issues with line art, so try a few different zoom levels. The PDF files will not work in Apple’s Preview.app, but will load in the Safari browser with the Acrobat plugin. Although the PDFs are fussy, the SVG files should load in any capable vector-based editor. The PNG images on the next pages work well in all browsers except possibly Internet Explorer. The PDFs are each one single, very long page and will not print correctly. Contact me for a printable file.
Sequence No. 1 for Disklavier (PDF, SVG, mp3, image)
Sequence No. 2 for Disklavier (PDF, SVG, mp3, image)
Sequence No. 3 for Disklavier (PDF, SVG, mp3)
Sequence No. 4 for Disklavier (PDF, SVG, mp3, image)
Study No. 6 for Player Piano (PDF, SVG, mp3, image)
Sequence No. 5 for Disklavier (PDF, SVG, mp3)
Sequence No. 6 for Disklavier (PDF, SVG, mp3)
Sequence No. 7 for Disklavier (PDF, SVG, mp3)
Sequence No. 8 for Disklavier (PDF, SVG, mp3)
Sequence No. 4 for Disklavier, much faster (mp3)
Program Notes:
Tonight’s concert will be performed entirely by one Yamaha Disklavier Mark IV Pro, a modern player piano. It is leaps and bounds ahead of all previous models; at times tonight, it will strike hundreds of notes per second. This model is not at all similar to those most commonly seen, and is capable of ten times the level of nuance available to traditional MIDI files. It must instead receive specially formatted instructions to play with this level of precision.
Many of the pieces on tonight’s concert are based on change ringing, a centuries-old English art of performing order permutations on specially constructed bells. In most of the tradition’s numerous methods, all bells are initially rung in descending order, usually tuned to a major scale; adjacent pairs are then swapped as specified by the chosen ringing method. This method is then repeated until the initial row, “rounds,” is again heard. According to the rules of change ringing, each bell is to be struck exactly once in each row permutation, or “change”; no permutations are to be repeated; no bell will migrate more than one position from one change to the next; and bells are struck only one at a time. Method ringing on collections of six, eight, ten, and twelve bells is common, but compositions tonight will feature complete methods on up to 88 “bells.” Simple “Plain Hunt” and “Plain Bob” methods are used in Sequence Nos. 3, 4, and 8. In the fastest of these change ringing compositions, although at times it may sound as if notes are striking simultaneously, no two notes are ever struck at once; in fact, in many of tonight’s method ringing sequences, every note is heard alone and is of exactly the same duration.
In Sequence No. 8 accidentals are applied to each change of a three-octave (22 bell) diatonic “Plain Bob” realization according to a key indicated by the bell that occupies the second place in that change. Scale degrees of each new key determine the attack volume and duration of each bell in individual changes. Bells that sit on the tonic scale degree are doubled in octaves outside three-octave range of the bells. The remaining pieces make use of similar, but historically nonmusical schemes to control similarity and change over time, except Study No. 6, which was composed more traditionally.
I am grateful to Yamaha Artist Services for allowing use of their pianos, even covering moving and tuning costs, Mari Kimura, and Mr. Babbitt, for his cheerful and invaluable support.
The first of Alex Lipowski’s performances of Study for Percussionist and Electronics at Beyond the Machine 5.0 (April 12th and 13th, 2006) in the Clark Theater can be heard below. Open this xspf playlist with something else if the flash player does not work.
From this article by Ed Bilous and Mari Kimura:
Closed[Brendan] embarks this time on an interactive work titled Study for Percussionist and Electronics, performed by Alex Lipowski. In this work, there is no written score in the traditional sense, and the performance is a discovery process nearly as much for the performer as for the audience. The percussionist will strike a silent “pad” with sensors, which will be fed into a computer, using the interactive computer system Max/MSP. Every aspect of the music then heard through the speakers will be governed entirely by the performer’s actions.
If the flash player above does not work, open the RoboRecital XSPF Playlist in any of these applications.
RoboRecital
Music of J. Brendan Adamson
Tuesday, November 30th 2004, 8:00 PM
Paul Hall, The Juilliard School
Flyer (PDF)
Program Notes
There was a lot of press, some of which is still available online:
- Michael Beckerman’s article in the New York Times
- Mari Kimura’s article for the Juilliard Journal
- Guitar Review, New York Magazine (and other local press), Slashdot, and others covered it; see this for some
More on the next page.
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