This is the last section of Chromatic Field 82z, completed today. It is the last of a set of 26 pieces in which the performer plays at least one note from each event (events progressing from pairs of notes to chords of 3, 4, 6, 8 and 10 notes).
cf. Material (1960) for any ensemble of harmony instruments by Cornelius Cardew.
Month: October 2015
Regeneration Game (100 one bar variations on a C major scale)
I wrote Regeneration Game in the summer of 1993 whilst house sitting in Kensington, London. There was a grand piano and a lot of space. It was a summer of transition; I’d given up my flat in Lansdowne Crescent* and I was buying a flat in Wilbury Villas, Hove (now the city of Brighton and Hove).
*Lansdowne Cresecnt is the street where Jimi Hendrix died at the Samarkand Hotel in 1970,
I had worked with Ikon Corporation, a London gallery for contemporary furniture and design, who had commissioned music from me for four exhibitions. One day I called in and they had a copy of Paolo Pallucco’s 100 Sedie In Una Notte (100 chairs in one night), a book cataloguing a design project, published in 1990.
The 100 Sedie begins with a neutral, black, square dining chair: Square seat, square back and four square legs. The designer then goes on to create 100 variations on this basic design by, for example, extending, reducing or reshaping the back, or the seat or the legs.
I decided to write a version in music. To do so I needed a neutral theme in music to correspond to Pallucco’s basic chair design. I decided to use a C major scale, that is, a one octave ascending C major scale notated in quarter notes, starting on middle C and ending one octave higher (with a time signature of 8/4).
I then wrote 100 one bar variations on the theme, the first of which is the same C major scale, but descending; a retrograde.
The score is available to download from the British Music Collection. Print copy available from soundkiosk.com
SOUNDkioskBlog 