I originally intended for this piece to be a trio for Horn, Cello, and Piano (essentially a horn trio with cello instead of violin). In studying some of the standard horn trios I became enamored with a brief passage in the third movement of Brahm’s Horn Trio in E-Flat Major. Having studied the Bach library of externals for Max/MSP over the summer, I decided to try using some of the tools I was working on to create new material based on the pitch class set of the aforementioned moment in the Brahms.
As I wrote I began to wonder: am I not using the computer in much the same way as composers like Brahms used the piano? As a tool for the compositional process? Listen to the piece and you will find my answer. I replaced the piano with computer and the result is the present work.
One other particularly interesting element of this piece is the inclusion of a drone of difference tones in the second section. I tuned the five original pitches from the Brahms in five limit just-intonation and played them in the octave of C6. The five pitches create Quadratic difference tones with one another, producing 10 new tones altogether. The psycho-acoustic effect is very interesting and is something that I will continue exploring in the future.
Kristen Ronning – Horn
Hanna Rumora – Cello
Kevin Swenson – Computer
Glad I heard this in person! It was very interesting.