How to compose for Anthony Roth Constanzo
OrchestrasThe countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and bass-baritone Davóne Tines are among current performers of songs by Jonathan Dawe, who has landed a management deal with Cherny Artists. He is the company’s first composer.
In the press release we read: ‘Vocalists are drawn to Dawe’s music, which involves the recasting of energies and sounds of the past into decisively new expressions, through compositional workings based on fractal geometry.’
So that’s how it’s done?
It’s Davóne Tines, not Devóne Tines. You might also fix “cureent” while you’re at it.
NL must have spilled coffee on his keyboard. The number of omitted vowels, scrambled spellings, and duplicated words has grown considerably of late.
It’s ‘art speak’.
How do fractals sound?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRwzpLj5H8U
But Mr Dawe also puts ‘old music’ through his fractal machine:
https://www.jonathandawe.com/opera/cracked-orlando-dramma-per-musica-e-fractals/
He begins to understand that writing ‘real music’ is the avantgarde of today. But since his mindset is still modernist, he needs an excuse to be seen as ‘modern’, hence the fractals. Obviously, fractals have a very limited understanding of music.
On a more serious note: what are fractals? The 20C mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot describes them thus:
“A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
So, a nested structure in which the parts relate to the whole in a literal way. It is one of the wonders of mathematics and of the order of the universe, and its structures can be found everywhere, especially in the formations in nature. It is saying something about reality, and about the human mind.
When composers use fractals in their writing, they take the structural properties of mathematics too literally, it is a materialist mindset, comparable with Schoenberg’s 12-tone system. Music is a kind of ‘fluid mathematics’ in the sense that it makes use of numerous relationships between tones, based upon the laws of tonality: the harmonic series, as discovered by Pythagoras. Music is nested: parts relate to greater parts which relate to the whole, etc. Also language is nested: words form sentences form paragraphs, etc. But you cannot apply mathematics in a direct way onto music – it’s an unimaginative and simplistic shortcut, bypassing the mathematical properties of music itself. Mostly it is composers who don’t understand the nature of mathematics in music who turn towards a literal interpretation of math for their works. You can hear it in the results – they are unmusical.
You need to argue this out with J.S. Bach.
He tried to call him but didn’t get through the system. Then he tried Mrs Brown but she had meanwhile joined Mr Bach. The issue is nonsense IMO, a fractal is simply a device to listen correctly to Pli selon Pli. I use it on a daily basis!
Sally
a chart topper for sure.
Dr Hofstadter from the Texas Institute of Technology has set-up a research project with the aim to find-out whether working with fractals influence the human mind. He organised a team of 12 mathematicians, with the instruction for each of them, to organise a team themselves, independently from each other. When they all got together to compare results, it appeared that it was impossible to stuff 1728 mathematicians in one meeting room, and all of them had the same result: ‘Yes’. The teams multiplied 3 times and if Hofstadter had not stopped them, scientific proof would have increased infinitely, which was too much even for the TIT.