Sonic sculptures (generative modular music)

(For Paula)

This patch was inspired by hours (weeks?) of listening to Morton Feldman’s exquisite music. It ended up quite different harmonically from Feldman’s pieces, partly due to the limitations of a modular system. The envelope generators and attenuators required some tweaking to get that balance between repetition and divergence, revolving and evolving. In retrospect, I could have left longer silences between notes.
NOTE: no delay effect used here, as it would have reintroduced a pulse.

“Almost all of Feldman’s music is slow and soft. Only at first sight is this a limitation. I see it rather as a narrow door, to whose dimensions one has to adapt oneself (as in Alice in Wonderland) before one can pass through it into a state of being that is expressed in Feldman’s music. Only when one has become accustomed to the dimness of the light can one begin to perceive the richness and variety which is the material of the music...Feldman sees sounds as reverberating endlessly, never getting lost, changing their resonances as they die away, or rather not die away, but recede from our ears, and soft because softness is compelling, because an insidious invasion of our senses is more effective than a frontal attack.”” -- Cornelius Cardew, quoted by John Tilbury in “On Playing Feldman”

Video sequences from Works of Calder (d. Herbert Matter, 1950), an experimental film featuring a soundtrack by John Cage; available at archive.org.

Title image: Tentoonstelling Kinetische Plastiek Am. beeldhouwer Alexander Calder in Stedelij, Bestanddeelnr (October 2, 1969); creative commons.

Modules used:
Expert Sleepers’ Disting EX
Disting mk4
ALM’s Pamela’s New Workout
Behringer Neutron
ALM’s Pip Slope x2
Make Noise Maths
Intellijel Quad VCA
Tesseract’s Sweet Sixteen

#ambient #electronicmusic #modular #modularmusic #minimalism #eurorack #piano