Nocturne: Qizha (polymicrotonal)

I suppose this section is the most relevant to post this piece... You will notice however that it makes use of electronic resources despite its nature, rather than as an aesthetic component. If there were acoustic instruments that could play this music I would write for them instead (sorry computer).

I welcome any and all engagement with this music in particular aesthetic criticism but also technical criticism, comments on the score (yes there are many that can be made, this is obviously not the level of score you can present to a performer and expect a performance -- in future I think I will slightly tone down the level of stemless notes and instead use the midi export as an example of how liberal the performer should be with duration, at the moment quite a few annotations would be needed to provide the necessary iNocturneqizhamp3.mp3nfo to lead to creation of muscle memory) etc.

I write this music in Repear in the piano roll and then created the score from that after the fact. I feel that writing directly onto manuscript paper is contrary to the aesthetic direction in which I want to take my music.

The eighth tone accidentals are approximations of the true pitches, none of which align to 48 edo or subsets therein.

Thank you very much for listening.

Qizha score.pdf

On 3/7/2021 at 10:46 PM, Nick_ said:

I write this music in Repear in the piano roll and then created the score from that after the fact. I feel that writing directly onto manuscript paper is contrary to the aesthetic direction in which I want to take my music.

The problem is if you don't use some kind of stave the pitches will be indeterminate. Unfortunately most software uses 5 line staves although I believe Dorico allows the creation of custom staves.

It's a work that would have done well on the old analogue synthesisers if the builder had arranged the keyboard span so the voltage across it could be adjusted. I volt per octave gave the standard scale; 0.5v per keyboard octave would give quarter tones, 0.25v 1/8 tones etc very exactly although the performer would have to adjust their playing technique.

I felt a better "timeline" system might have made things more explicit in the absence of a fixed rhythm which would allow you more scope to indicate the duration of each note, groups of notes to be played simultaneously could be given some kind of vertical indication. One thing attractive about your particular composition is the frequent variation of density coupled with dynamics, and the occasional use of silence. Many composers overlook the importance of silence in works of this kind.

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Thanks for you reply Quinn!

9 hours ago, Quinn said:

The problem is if you don't use some kind of stave the pitches will be indeterminate.

Indeed, in this score the pitches are completely indeterminate, they are not eighth tones as the accidentals imply, they are approximated to eighth tones for visual purposes only. The only practical way to play this that I can think of would be to create software that automatically mapped pitches onto keyboard keys (of the performers' choice), factoring in surrounding notes that the player has performed (so that the same key can be used for different pitches at different points in the performance) -- so the performer would create their own score with their own (conventional) accidentals for performance purposes. Either that or some huge abomination of a midi instrument that would require tremendous virtuosity.

Custom staves are an interesting point that I hadn't considered, but how could one produce precise pitch notation on a stave with non linear (and non octave-repeating) temperaments?

9 hours ago, Quinn said:

I felt a better "timeline" system might have made things more explicit in the absence of a fixed rhythm which would allow you more scope to indicate the duration of each note, groups of notes to be played simultaneously could be given some kind of vertical indication.

Indeed, I thought that, for example, indicating seconds was too precise for me, but I suppose there's no reason it has to be that precise as the "sections" of seconds are only relative to one other, which frees up the space to have more metered notes which this score definitely needs. And yes vertical indication definitely needed as the notation software does not readjust the positions of noteheads after you hide stems.

Is there a point in hiding the stems? (one that I can see is that without stems the relative durations remain unspecified, in which case some sort of timeline would help to provide the distinction. Although only approximate it would guide the performer about the difference between notes of 0.25, 0.4, 0.75 seconds etc duration - or fast and slow delivery in gross terms).

On 3/21/2021 at 12:43 AM, Quinn said:

Is there a point in hiding the stems? (one that I can see is that without stems the relative durations remain unspecified, in which case some sort of timeline would help to provide the distinction. Although only approximate it would guide the performer about the difference between notes of 0.25, 0.4, 0.75 seconds etc duration - or fast and slow delivery in gross terms).

 

Apologies for the delay Quinn, for some reason it did not email me your reply.

The idea behind hiding the stems was that I wanted to make it abundantly clear to the performer that the rhythm is their domain. The flexibility I am looking for as regards rhythm can, as you point out, be more than obtained without hiding the stems. I just wanted to, so to speak, force the performer out of the mindset that says "the metrical rhythms presented here are a starting point that I will interpret from", as opposed to "the pitches here are the starting point from which I carve my rhythm".

As it is I think for some sections this works, but for others it just makes the score totally unapproachable, so the next time I will be more generous with stems.

So in this fashion any timeline would be far more approximate than fractions of a second, and would probably be coupled with stemmed and stemless notes. Rhythmical accuracy is not the goal here 🙂