Structure of a composition

I mentioned in an earlier post that I have started reading Curtis Roads “microsound” [Roads, 2001]. The concepts in this book, however not entirely new to me, is starting to influence my work on the harp piece. For this composition I’m working with an extremely long tone row (750 notes) that has a fractal structure to it. From this I derived three permutations by treating it as a table and applying different functions to it (I will get in to the details of this in a future post - stay tuned…). From the figure (it’s hard to see any details because of the small scale) it can be seen that all permutations except one retains its original shape to a large degree.

Now I have starting experimenting with making granular sounds using the same functions. Theoretically its very exciting to have the same functions governing the structure all the way from micro to macro scale.