WHERE DO YOU COME FROM LITTLE SEEDLING? (2010) 10'
A piece for cello and electronics
Anna Lindemann | music
David Gibson | cello
Synful Orchestra & Kontakt | electronics
Instrumentation | cello, electronics
Premiere | 5 May 2010, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Troy, NY
When we began working together on a piece for cello and electronics, David Gibson had just begun planting his expansive garden and I had been thinking about ways of composing music using biological development as a model. It seems only fitting that a seedling should emerge from our collaboration — from a cluster of notes springs forth a cotyledon. Just as the music portrays the development of a seedling, so is the music developed like a seedling. The algorithmic musical textures are inspired by the nested hierarchical development of biological forms — the same genetic program may be used to define a stem and the central vein along a leaf and the veins that grow out from those veins just as the music is composed of motifs nested within motifs nested within motifs. The algorithmic musical textures are shaped by musical apoptosis (programmed cell death) — a complex biological form may emerge from dying off during development just as a musical form emerges from killing off notes in a dense musical texture.