What Dreams May Come - Ambient Suite for Jazz Orchestra

<p>What Dreams May Come is a five-movement suite for jazz orchestra, intended to create a calm and relaxing listening experience. The project is inspired by the mystery of dreaming, and it attempts to communicate musical ideas which reflect the relaxed state one is in when sleeping. The aims of What Dreams May Come are to highlight the timbral combinations available in a jazz orchestra and to draw on characteristics of ambient music to give the listener a relaxing atmosphere. This exegesis explores timbre both in music that served as inspiration for this composition and in the composition itself, and it describes how emphasising timbre in my compositional process affected other musical elements of the piece. Chapter 1 explores Brian Eno’s ambient album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, specifically looking at the role of timbre and texture in the album, and at the overall structuring techniques used by Eno on the album to create coherency. Chapter 2 analyses two compositions for jazz orchestra by Maria Schneider, “Nocturne” and “Sea of Tranquility”, examining the role of timbre in the compositions, as well as the ways Schneider uses soft dynamics and harmonic techniques to structure the pieces. These two chapters look into how Eno and Schneider, in different ways, both highlight timbre in their compositional approaches and processes. Each chapter dives deep into timbral and textural analysis, with additional analysis of form and harmony. Chapter 3 reflects on the ways these two composers informed What Dreams May Come, focussing on how I used techniques from Eno and Schneider to challenge myself in composing for jazz orchestra. In the course of the project, I strove to tap into music’s therapeutic qualities, putting this idea at the forefront of my intentions as a composer. Using dreaming as aesthetic and conceptual influence, Brian Eno’s ambient music as inspiration, and Maria Schneider’s compositions as a musical guide, I have been able to produce a work which not only challenges traditional jazz orchestra techniques but also relaxes listeners by complementing their environments.</p>

What Dreams May Come - Ambient Suite for Jazz Orchestra

<p>What Dreams May Come is a five-movement suite for jazz orchestra, intended to create a calm and relaxing listening experience. The project is inspired by the mystery of dreaming, and it attempts to communicate musical ideas which reflect the relaxed state one is in when sleeping. The aims of What Dreams May Come are to highlight the timbral combinations available in a jazz orchestra and to draw on characteristics of ambient music to give the listener a relaxing atmosphere. This exegesis explores timbre both in music that served as inspiration for this composition and in the composition itself, and it describes how emphasising timbre in my compositional process affected other musical elements of the piece. Chapter 1 explores Brian Eno’s ambient album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, specifically looking at the role of timbre and texture in the album, and at the overall structuring techniques used by Eno on the album to create coherency. Chapter 2 analyses two compositions for jazz orchestra by Maria Schneider, “Nocturne” and “Sea of Tranquility”, examining the role of timbre in the compositions, as well as the ways Schneider uses soft dynamics and harmonic techniques to structure the pieces. These two chapters look into how Eno and Schneider, in different ways, both highlight timbre in their compositional approaches and processes. Each chapter dives deep into timbral and textural analysis, with additional analysis of form and harmony. Chapter 3 reflects on the ways these two composers informed What Dreams May Come, focussing on how I used techniques from Eno and Schneider to challenge myself in composing for jazz orchestra. In the course of the project, I strove to tap into music’s therapeutic qualities, putting this idea at the forefront of my intentions as a composer. Using dreaming as aesthetic and conceptual influence, Brian Eno’s ambient music as inspiration, and Maria Schneider’s compositions as a musical guide, I have been able to produce a work which not only challenges traditional jazz orchestra techniques but also relaxes listeners by complementing their environments.</p>

Introduction

The book is arbitrarily structured around the parameters of melody, rhythm, harmony, texture, and pre-compositional approaches. All chapters start with a brief note on terminology and general recommendations for the instructor and the student. The first five chapters offer a variety of exercises that range from analysis and style imitation, to the use of probabilities. The chapter about pre-compositional approaches offers original techniques that a student composer can implement in order to start a new work. This last section of the book fosters creative connections with other disciplines such as math, visual arts, and architectural acoustics. Each of the 100 exercises contained in the book proposes a unique set of guidelines and constraints intended to place the student in a specific compositional framework. Through those compositional boundaries the student is encouraged to produce creative work within a given structure. Using the methodologies in this book, students will be able to create their own outlines for their compositions, making intelligent and educated compositional choices that balance reasoning with intuition.

ROMANIAN POETRY FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND MUSIC

The article outlines approaches and syntheses of high complexity, made within the framework of reference compositional creations by leading composers from Romania and the Republic of Moldova. Among them are Sigismund Toduta, Paul Constantinescu, Vasile Spatarelu, Felicia Donceanu, Viorel Munteanu, Dan Voiculescu, Vladimir Rotaru, Vlad Burlea, etc. The compositional approaches to poetic sources, which fall within the musical trends of the 20th century and are representative of national and universal music, are particularly diverse and original.

PRINCIPLES AND APPROACHES FORMALLY COMPOSITION IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

The article analyzes the features of the application of the principles of formal composition in the design activities of an architect-designer. Separated notions of formal composition, formal compositional approach, formal compositional principle. The characterization of the "world" as an all-encompassing concept is revealed. Parallels are given between design composition and formal composition in art. Approaches to the formation of environmental composition (plot, montage and formal) have been analyzed and created. Categories and concepts are summarized in tabular form. Examples of the application of various compositional approaches to the development of trade showcases are compared.

WIKI-PIANO: EXAMINING THE CROWD-SOURCED COMPOSITION OF A CONTINUOUSLY CHANGING INTERNET-BASED SCORE

ABSTRACTAlexander Schubert's WIKI-PIANO.NET is an internet-based score, commissioned by the author and performed by him on an international tour from 2018 to 2020. The website score contains modules of notation, text, images, video and sound that can be edited by any member of the public, similar to a Wikipedia page. This article explores the huge volume and variety of content added to the score over the first 20 months after the premiere, and the extreme compositional approaches and unusual patterns of internet behaviour displayed. Examining these contributions offers insights into the online culture of new music, including its approaches to humour, its creative competitiveness, its mastery of memes, and its sophisticated subversions of the relationship between composer, performer and audience.

The Future is Graphic: Animated notation for contemporary practice

A growing number of musicians are recognising the importance of re-thinking notation and its capacity to support contemporary practice. New music is increasingly more collaborative and polystylistic, engaging a greater range of sounds from both acoustic and electronic instruments. Contemporary compositional approaches combine composition, improvisation, found sounds, production and multimedia elements, but common practice music notation has not evolved to reflect these developments. While traditional notations remain the most effective way to communicate information about tempered harmony and the subdivision of metre for acoustic instruments, graphic and animated notations may provide an opportunity for the representation and communication of electronic music. If there is a future for notating electronic music, the micro-tonality, interactivity, non-linear structures, improvisation, aleatoricism and lack of conventional rhythmic structures that are features of it will not be facilitated by common practice notation. This article proposes that graphic and animated notations do have this capacity to serve electronic music, and music that combines electronic and acoustic instruments, as they enable increased input from performers from any musical style, reflect the collaborative practices that are a signpost of current music practice. This article examines some of the ways digitally rendered graphic and animated notations can represent contemporary electronic music-making and foster collaboration between musicians and composers of different musical genres, integrating electronic and acoustic practices.

Embedding the de Bruijn graph, and applications to metagenomics

Fast mapping of sequencing reads to taxonomic clades is a crucial step in metagenomics, which however raises computational challenges as the numbers of reads and of taxonomic clades increases. Besides alignment-based methods, which are accurate but computational costly, faster compositional approaches have recently been proposed to predict the taxonomic clade of a read based on the set of k-mers it contains. Machine learning-based compositional approaches, in particular, have recently reached accuracies similar to alignment-based models, while being considerably faster. It has been observed that the accuracy of these models increases with the length k of the k-mers they use, however existing methods are limited to handle k-mers of lengths up to k = 12 or 13 because of their large memory footprint needed to store the model coefficients for each possible k-mer. In order to explore the performance of machine learning-based compositional approaches for longer k-mers than currently possible, we propose to reduce the memory footprint of these methods by binning together k-mers that appear together in the sequencing reads used to train the models. We achieve this binning by learning a vector embedding for the vertices of a compacted de Bruijn graph, allowing us to embed any DNA sequence in a low-dimensional vector space where a machine learning system can be trained. The resulting method, which we call Brume, allows us to train compositional machine learning-based models with k-mers of length up to k = 31. We show on two metagenomics benchmark that Brume reaches better performance than previously achieved, thanks to the use of longer k-mers.

Between the Abstract and the Concrete: A Constraint-Based Approach to Navigating Instrumental Space

This article deals with a way that algorithmic composition systems can be informed by material realities of musical performance. After a general discussion of the relation of abstract algorithms to concrete materiality, the article focuses on the idea of an instrument's space of possibilities. It briefly discusses a number of compositional approaches that seek to derive musical structure from bodily movements and from the physical properties of instruments. The last part describes a new open-source JavaScript library called OboeJS and a Web application based on this library. The system is an experimental exploration of the idea of instrumental space and an attempt to bring together abstract algorithmic processing and the concrete possibilities of a musical instrument. The system implements a flexible constraint-based search algorithm for the generation of oboe fingering sequences. This tool is presented as part of a wider approach to algorithmic composition that aims not to map data output of generative procedures to “sound generators” (e.g., performers, instruments, sound synthesis processes). Instead, I propose to derive structure from the space of possibilities of the instrument itself, which in this case is the oboe.

Grasping the Intimate Immensity: Acousmatic compositional techniques in sound art as ‘something to hold on to’

This article explores the accessibility of acousmatic compositional approaches to sound and installation art. Principally of concern is the consideration of intimacy to create a means of ‘connecting’ with an audience. Installations might be said to explore ideas of intimacy in two ways which increase accessibility for the installation visitor: through cultivating installation–visitor relationships, and through encouraging visitor–visitor relationships. A variety of ways in which various acousmatic compositional techniques relating to intimacy might be brought to bear on and operate as a way of drawing a listener into a work are explored, in particular as they relate to the consideration of space and spatial relationships. These include recording techniques, types of sound materials chosen, and the creation of particular spatial environments and listening conditions. Along with a number of instances of sound art provided by way of examples, my ongoing GRIDs series of sound sculptures will provide a case study of works related to an acousmatic aesthetic where these concerns find an outlet.