Revisions, improvements and upcoming performances

This has been a busy weekend for me. I completed most of the work for a port from PsyCollider (the Windows variant of SuperCollider) to MAX/MSP of the software for the live electronics part to The Doppelgänger. That took over 12 hours of work on Friday, but it was great because I acquainted myself with more MAX objects, including Dan Trueman's munger~, a granular pitch shifter. I'm going through with the conversion primarily because programming GUIs is impossible in PsyCollider and very difficult in SuperCollider, and a reliable and easy-to-use interface is absolutely necessary for portable electroacoustic pieces. This port is in preparation of an upcoming contrabass clarinet performance of The Doppelgänger by Detroit clarinetist Shannon Orme.

I also just finished several months of revisions to the Eris movement of Nyx & Eris. Since mid-summer I've been making the rhythms more ensemble friendly... the "countdown" style processes that ravage the texture of the piece incessantly have been contained to the sections where they were absolutely important (the Introduction, the Ritual Dance of Echidna: Mother of All Monsters, and the build-up to the Catastrophic Failure of Celestial Mechanics). I rather like the idea of pitting shifting accents against semi-regular pulses, because I think the sense of rhythmic conflict and syncopation can be just as interesting as dense mixed-meter rhythms. This now occurs during the more romantic, triadic and melody driven Lunar Light and Starlight Tapestries, which have been given more regular compound time signatures. Also, the cheap "micropolyphony" that previously formed the tapestry texture in those sections has been replaced with more carefully woven counterpoint. The rock/kecak texture of the Dance of Eris: Goddess of Discord has been applied to the texture of the Dance of Dysnomia: Goddess of Lawlessness, allowing the winds to get in on the kecak like percussive effects (slap tongue, tongue pizzacato, etc), while the strings go even more insane with bow pressure changes that strive for subharmonics and other interesting anomalous low frequencies. These revisions were completed in anticipation of the January performance schedule by the Playground Ensemble.

More on the exact details of these performances later!