Henry David Thoreau comes to mind when thinking about the relation between that which is created and that which is found. These two rationales can be summarized in the homonyms /I/ and /eye/. The ego creates and the senses finds and explores. The /I/ is the method and the /eye/ is the nature.
Program note
/Method and Ignorance/ is a piece in four parts for piano and electronics dedicated to pianist Chryssie Nanou and loosely inspired by these thoughts. The title alludes to the strange dynamic between the precision and discipline that all musical practices are built upon and, at the same time, the necessity for breaking with these methodologies and allowing for an approach that is intuitive rather than structured. It is a dialectical relation that both reinforces and negates the respective positions.
The ‘method’ that this particular piece is built upon is based on a related complex relationship–both in terms of physics and its impact on the history of Western musics–between equal temperament (ET) and just intonation. The tonal material derived for the piece consists of a scale of fourteen pitches. One segment of this material consists of the eight lowest partials whose intonation differs less than four cents from its equal temperament counterpart. One example is the fifth ($3/2$) that deviates from an ET fifth with 2 cents. This subsection of the scale is played by the piano.
This scale is complemented with an additional six tones that deviate the most from ET, such as the 11th overtone ($11/8$) which is almost a quarter tone lower than the corresponding ET pitch. This subsection is played by the electronics. Together these fourteen pitches, a selection up until the 57th overtone, provide a scale that allows for particular harmonic relationships that are only accessible through the meta instrument that is the result of the piano together with the computer. This highly structured and methodologically derived material is however also ignored to a certain extent and approached intuitively.