Program Notes
Although they are the smallest mountain chain in the world, the Sutter Buttes loomed large over the horizon of Yuba City when I was growing up. The materials for this piece are inspired by and derived from the contour of the Buttes. With help from my mentor, Dr. Jean-François Charles, I made a program that extracted the contour of the mountain from a still photograph. After compressing the data, I algorithmically generated a melody that follows the contour of the mountain. This melody is heard throughout the piece in many different textures and guises. Similar algorithmic manipulations were used to create a series of tempi, rhythmic patterns, and even a series of meter changes.
The obvious part of the piece’s title refers to this process. But why Sutter Buttes Theft in Variations? The theft comes in two ways. From one perspective, the melodic and harmonic material is “stolen” from the Sutter Buttes. More deviously, however, I stole directly from several famous pieces by composers of the past. For example, the piece’s dark opening is modeled directly on the introduction of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra; the dance-like section that follows it is modeled on the “Coda” movement from Stravinsky’s Agon; later in the piece there is a section that juxtaposes a quote from Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture with relentless, dissonant chords inspired by The Rite of Spring; there is also a minimalist section inspired by an ostinato figure in Dalbavie’s Palimpseste. Between these moments of theft are sections of entirely original material. Together they ebb and flow up and down from intensity to stasis, just like the setting sun backlighting the contour of the Sutter Buttes.
Technical Notes
*** The discussion below is an excerpt from my forthcoming dissertation “The Piano Spoke and the Mountain Sang: In Defense of Computer Assisted Composition and Analysis.” My goal is not to provide a complete discussion of the entire compositional process of Sutter Buttes Theft in Variations, but rather to detail the basic process through which I derived the basic materials from the contour of the Buttes. ***
The computer assisted composition techniques I developed in Sutter Buttes Theft in Variations represent a development of techniques inspired by images that I used in two earlier works. Namely, these are the use of the Sierpinski Triangle in Two Sierpinski Pieces for saxophone quartet, and the use of the Archimedean Spiral in the string quartet Spiraling (Just, Like Archimedes). In both works, I generated renderings of the Sierpinski Triangle and Archimedean Spiral inside the computer and analyzed the results of my computer renderings. The materials of Sutter Buttes Theft in Variations, however, did not come from a computer-generated image, but from a computational analysis of a real picture of the Sutter Buttes themselves.
The first step in the computational process used to generate the basic materials of Sutter Buttes Theft in Variations was to download pictures of the Sutter Buttes. I did this simply by downloading images that I found using Google’s image search engine. Images were chosen based on both their overall photographic quality, as well as whether they appeared to show the entirety of the Buttes. After downloading the images, I cropped out excess data that was likely to obscure the difference between the Buttes and their surroundings inside the computer. While I tried several different images of the Buttes, the one that I used for the piece is given below.
The next step was to import this image into Max as a four-plane jitter matrix, in which the planes contain red, green, blue, and alpha color channel values (RGBA) respectively. This RGBA data was converted to alpha, hue, saturation, and lightness (AHSL) data, of which only the hue data was used in the piece. Hue may be understood as the location of a particular color in a spectral representation of the color continuum spanning red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. When this spectral color continuum is arranged on a circle, any one color may be selected via a “hue angle” that indicates a particular position along the circle. [2] In Max, I selected a hue angle to process the image such that I could select only those pixels that did not contain the blue hue of the sky above the Buttes. Pixels that matched the sky were set to 0, and those that matched the Buttes were set to 1. The resulting processed image is given below.
After processing the image, I summed the resulting values for each column of data so that there was only one vertical value for each horizontal pixel and then normalized these values to be in the range of 0 to 1. This resulted in an image that contained only the general contour of the Buttes, as shown below.
The original cropped picture of the Buttes was 1200×324 pixels; the extracted contour is 12000×240 pixels.[3] While the size of the vertical dimension is negligible because of the way I ultimately transformed the contour into musical notes, the 1200 pixels across the x-axis are too many because I treated the x-axis as a grid of onsets. In other words, if I have 1200 pixels, I will generate 1200 unique onsets and I found this to be way too large for my practical purposes. Therefore, the last step in processing the image data was to reduce the resolution of the extracted contour. In this case, I reduced the x-axis resolution to 30 pixels by taking every fortieth value which resulted in a contour that generally follows that of the Buttes. The results of this reduction are shown below.
I used this reduced contour to generate the basic pitched materials in the piece. Each point on the x-axis was treated as an independent onset, and the y-axis value at that point was scaled to fit a frequency spectrum from 38.89Hz to 2489.01Hz. In musical notes this spans Eb0 to Eb7, a range that was chosen because it fits the general range of the sinfonietta for which Sutter Buttes Theft in Variations was composed. The resulting pitches are given below. [4]
This series of pitches was used to compose the materials from measures 271 through 295 in the piece. It was also used to derive other musical materials such as smaller tone rows, tempo schemes, and a series of meters. For more information about the compositional process of Sutter Buttes Theft in Variations, one can read my Dissertation.
[1] Dennis Wyatt. “California’s Sutter County.” The Westside Express, May 15, 2023. www.thewestsideexpress.com. Accessed March 30, 2026.
[2] Paul Green-Armytage. “Color Circle,” in Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology, link.springer.com, accessed March 26, 2026.
[3] The vertical dimension is decreased after contour extraction because of the rejection of parts of the image.
[4] This series contains 29 notes, because the D6 in the second system occurred twice in a row.
Performers
Caleb Estrada-Valentín, flute
Felisha Jones, oboe
Sayyod Mirzomurodov, clarinet
Erik J Lopez Reyes, bassoon
Matheus Silva De Souza, horn
Josh Levy, trumpet
Omar Elmusa, trombone
Elly Kern, tuba
John T Morris, piano
Miles Bohlman, percussion
Evan Tanner, percussion
Yestyn Griffith, violin I
Hugo Kaut, violin II
Kylie Little, viola
Chris Mendez, violoncello
Ryan Bell, double bass
Samuel Chen, conductor