A short piano piece of mine with the title four stars and one dark nebula was awarded the second prize at the 21st Ossietzky-Kompositionswettbewerb in Oldenburg, Germany. The successfully submitted works of this year’s composition will be premiered in the summer term next year at the University of Oldenburg that carried out the international composition competition.
This year’s prize in composition was awarded to works for experimentally played piano (with or without live electronics). The selected works should be of medium difficulty in order to be playable by talented music students.
I’m very happy that my submitted work could persuade the jury. In the recent years, several works of mine have been played by music students and I really believe that it is important for composers to be able to write high-class music that can be played also by musicians not yet specialised in contemporary music. It requires our scores to be notated in a very clear and appealing way at the first place, too. I do feel honoured that one of my works has now been quasi officially lauded for being especially eligible as an educational work.
The cellist and composer Tomasz Skweres will play «Jeux de lumière» for violoncello on October 16 and 28
There are two concerts coming up in October which I am particularly looking forward to: It’s a great honour for a composer when a truly excellent fellow composer such as Tomasz Skweres has decided to stage one of your solo pieces. Mr. Skweres is an award winning composer whose music is capable of capturing and affecting huge audiences while being very progressive and challenging in its compositional syntax at the same time. I do consider him one of the very best living composers of my generation.
Many great composers have been extremely good musicians as well. Think of Grieg, Brahms or Messiaen. I daresay that Tomasz Skweres contributes to this tradition, being the solo cellist of the Theter Regensburg’s orchestra and having played lots of solo recitals didicated to contemporary music.
On October 28, Tomasz Skweres will give a recital with music by Mateusz Ryczek, Manuela Kerer, Daniel Oliver Moser, Wolfgang Liebhart, Adam PorÄ™bski, Christoph Renhart and Tomasz Skweres at Vienna’s Alte Schmiede. The admission to this concert will be free—don’t miss the chance to visit the event. The Alte Schmiede offers a live stream too (please check their website) in case you’d like to join from outside Vienna.
Making-of
Jeux de lumière was composed in 2015, thus being quite an old work of mine already. I wrote the piece for a recital organized by the ÖGZM. Having been completely discontent with the piece after its premiere, I thoroughly revised it in 2017 and … abandoned it. So it fell asleep somehow and I thought it will just add to the many skeletons in my cupboard (unplayed pieces). Recently it mysteriously awoke from its hibernation after winning an international call for scores by a Japanese cellist in 2021. Thanks to the fabulous interpretation of Hugo Paiva in Leipzig in the past December, I have placed new confidence in this piece. Originally I thought some of the virtuous textures simply would not work out as expected, but thankfully Hugo’s stunning performance proved me wrong. Writing a solo piece that requires virtuosity to a great extent for an instrument one does not play very well or one does not play at all (such as me and the cello) is always a balancing act. It’s very easy to write something completely unplayable, however it is not a good strategy to avoid making mistakes or to compose rather cautiously, too. Putting one’s head above the parapet is somehow necessary when a composer does not intend to repeat him/herself. I strongly believe that composing has got a lot to do with honesty. Not hiding behind something that we know would work out well, but trying to find new and personal ways and never stop studying the many possibilities any instrument offers. We have to risk unplayable pieces, there is no other way, I’m sure. In short, Jeux de lumière turned out to be a risky piece, both for the performer and its composer, and today I have made my peace with it.
«Jeux de lumière» played by Hugo Paiva in Leipzig
On Friday, November 25, the J. J. Fux-Conservatory is organizing a piano recital dedicated to the »sounds of the night«. Students of the conservatory’s piano classes will perform works by Debussy, Romantic nocturnes and extracts from my cycle »XXI Orakel der Nacht«. The event is part of the conservatory’s concert series KonSonanzen.
Starts at 6 PM, Admission is free.
Performance did not take place due to illness of the pianist.
What animal has got a long, long (very long) neck apart from a giraffe? It has become most famous hobbling over the stage in some ballets and hissing around in ponds respectively.
The Typophone is an electronic instrument that runs in a web browser.
A JavaScript-based sampler with adjustable panning functions
From summer 2021 onwards I have been experiementing around with JavaScript in order to create a software which can be uses as an electronic part (as an electronic instrument) of new compositions – ready to run in your standard browser.
What to do with it
Let’s get down to the most important question: What can be done with this software and given that it is an instrument, how does it sound? There is a very best answer for it: Find it out!
The Typophone is basically a sampler writting in JavaScript using the Tone.js library. Additionally it provides the user some panning functions and a random mode. Moreover all keyboard events are being displayed – they can be made visible during a performance using a video beamer.
It might seem strange at first sight that such a software is written in JavaScript as most software that is used for sound synthesis and live electronics is usually written in a programming language optimised for sound synthesis (such as SuperCollider or Max MSP or Pd whereas JavaScript clearly is not), however, using JavaScript provides us a crucial advantage in my opinion that clocks off SuperCollider or Max. It’s running in your internet browser and everyone has got one.
Run it in your browser
Why is it crucial that such a software should be browser-based? There is a stunningly simple answer: Musicians can use it for practising. One of the major problems when it gets down to including live electronics into compositions is the fact that usually the setup is rather complicated and requires a spcialist capable of getting a Max/SC/Pd-program or similar to run. We cannot expect from a normal musician to have the technical expertise of handling and setting up a complex audio-environment and doing all the (admittingly quite exciting) spatialization stuff. However, as a composer I do expect my musicians to practise extensivly on a new piece. Thus, if a new piece has an electronic part, the musicians must have a viable way of practising with it. Hence I decided that a browser-based software would be most suitable.
Another fundamental decision was implementing stereophony. We might consider monophony an option as well–natural instruments and some electronic instruments such as electric guitars act as monophonic sound sources too–however, I did not want to take a pass on the excitement of having interesting panning effects. Moreover, every computer comes along with a stereo output, so I decided to make use of its scope. Neither quadrophony was an option for that very purpose (computers having usually only a stereo jack as a standard audio output) nor 5.1 surround sound.
Onstage
The Typophone is designed for two main application fields: It should work well and without installing anything complicated at home in your rehearsal room and onstage. While it can be assumed that everyone is connected to the internet at home (and thus you can comfortably use the typophone by just visiting a website) we can not be sure if in a concert hall WLAN or an ethernet connection is always or easily available. In short, the Typophone has to work offline too. Now, before running it offline we need to know a little bit about how interenet works. Usually we are navigating through the WWW in a web browser. If we enter a web address (an URL) in our browser it will try to start communicating with a server which hosts the page we want to see or the file we would like to download. To make a long story short, browsers rely on the client (browser) and server (a computer somewhere in the world that has the material we want) principle. The Typophone works according to this principle. All sounds are provided by a server and whenever the client asks for such a file, the server will deliver it. Now, what happens, if we just download all the files and doubleclick on player.html while we are offline? The site will open, and the browser will try to retrieve all sound files from the server, however there is no server available unless we run one on our own machine and tell our browser, where it is. So that’s exactly what we’ll have to do, if we’d like to use the Typophone onstage or offline. Sounds a little difficult, right? But don’t get discouraged, its quite easy to run a server. I have made a short tutorial that explains what to do in ten steps:
Thus far I have written two solo-pieces that involve the Typophone as an electronic part, Drei Illustrationen von Pflanzen for mezzosoprano being the first and Chameleon for one percussionist the other of the two compositions. In the work for mezzo-soprano and Typophone the text is being conveyd to the audience in several ways: Some parts are sung, some fragments are typed and projected to the wall while all the letters produce a distinctive or random sound at the same time and naturally the music itself reacts to the texts emotionally too. Using the Typophone in my compositions thus allows me to deal with any text quite contrapuntally. I instantly liked making use of it in my new works. Furthermore I have been looking for a way to make the process of a player creating a sound on an electronic device visible to the audience in a very straightforward way for a long time. I believe that I have now accomplished this end.
Up next
For now, the Typophone needs to prove successful in concert. I’m still not sure if my notation is already ideal. I decided to use quite a rudimentary kind of tablature, that seemed most logically. The program has got 10 modes, the pitches of the modes 1 to 9 are fixed and could be notated as normal notes, however mode 0 means random sounds. If I notated the actual pitches, it were necessary to have a tablature only for mode 0. That did not convince me. Using tablature would also be more flexible for future implementations like other tunings, other samples (maybe more noisy ones). At this juncture I have recorded a lot of bell-like sounds such as bowls or a gong. Naturally a software can be extended in so many ways that a notation for this instrument must remain extremely flexible or rudimentary. I will definitely continue noodling around with different tuning systems or detunings (seen technically this can be implemented very easily). So stay tuned and enjoy playing the Typophone (the current version is 1.4).
Getting an arbitrarily large amount of partials of a freely chosen fundamental is now just one click away.
How to get countably many partials of any tone you like in a very quick way
This program is dedicated to all friends of spectral music as well as composers and music theorists who have spent hours of their precious time writing down harmonic series of a given fundamental, calculate all the partials meticulously using a pocket calculator and comparing two or more overtone series on a piece of sheet music. Here’s the good news: There’s no need to make things more complicated than they should be. Let’s get all the numeracy done by using the computer. Remember the meaning of the word «computer»—computing things belongs to its core skills. And it keeps computing things flawlessly.
What can be done with this program? Suppose we would like to get the first 32 partials of the tone E2. Select E as tempered fundamental and 2 from the list of octaves (remember: C1 is the lowest C on the piano). Next click on Calculate and find the results below. In the table of results you will see the exact frequecy of each partial as well as its pitch (e.g. the 7th partial of a tone with a fundamental frequency of 32.703 Hz (C1) is 228.921 Hz which is A#3 minus 31 Cents).
Naturally all the frequencies depend significantly on the standard pitch. So we might want to compare the 17th partial on A2 using 440 Hz as a concert pitch with the 17th partial of A2 using 443 Hz as standard pitch. This can also done easily with the program. Let’s do the 440 Hz first:
Enter 440 Hz as standard pitch
Select A as tempered fundamental
Select 2 as octave
Click Calculate
Next, let’s run the program again with a different standard pitch:
Enter 443 Hz as standard pitch
Select A as tempered fundamental
Select 2 as octave
Click Calculate
Finally, compare the two results:
Fundamental A2 — 440 Hz standard pitch:
1
110.000
A2 plus 0 Cents
2
220.000
A3 plus 0 Cents
3
330.000
E4 plus 2 Cents
4
440.000
A4 plus 0 Cents
5
550.000
C#5 minus 14 Cents
6
660.000
E5 plus 2 Cents
7
770.000
G5 minus 31 Cents
8
880.000
A5 plus 0 Cents
9
990.000
B5 plus 4 Cents
10
1100.000
C#6 minus 14 Cents
11
1210.000
D#6 minus 49 Cents
12
1320.000
E6 plus 2 Cents
13
1430.000
F6 plus 41 Cents
14
1540.000
G6 minus 31 Cents
15
1650.000
G#6 minus 12 Cents
16
1760.000
A6 plus 0 Cents
17
1870.000
A#6 plus 5 Cents
Fundamental: A2 — results for 440 Hz as standard pitch
Fundamental A2 — 443 Hz standard pitch:
1
110.750
A2 plus 0 Cents
2
221.500
A3 plus 0 Cents
3
332.250
E4 plus 2 Cents
4
443.000
A4 plus 0 Cents
5
553.750
C#5 minus 14 Cents
6
664.500
E5 plus 2 Cents
7
775.250
G5 minus 31 Cents
8
886.000
A5 plus 0 Cents
9
996.750
B5 plus 4 Cents
10
1107.500
C#6 minus 14 Cents
11
1218.250
D#6 minus 49 Cents
12
1329.000
E6 plus 2 Cents
13
1439.750
F6 plus 41 Cents
14
1550.500
G6 minus 31 Cents
15
1661.250
G#6 minus 12 Cents
16
1772.000
A6 plus 0 Cents
17
1882.750
A#6 plus 5 Cents
Fundamental: A2 — results for 443 Hz as standard pitch
As you can see, the frequencies differ from each other. With 440 Hz as concert pitch the 17th partial of A2 is 1870 Hz (A#6 + 5 Ct.), whereas using a concert pitch of 443 Hz the 17th partial of A2 is 1882.75 Hz (also A#6 + 5 Ct. of course).
Moreover, you can also choose a non-tempered fundamental frequency in relation to any concert pitch you like. Let’s say, for instance, our concert pitch is 443 Hz and our fundamental is 60 Hz. As the fundamental is (possibly) not equal to a tempered tone, we select Other from the list of pitches and also Other from the list of octaves (it was somehow difficult to find an appropriate name for the input field and perhaps I’m gonna rename it as Other is admittingly not ideal here). Finally enter 60 in the field Fundamental / Grundfrequenz. Choose any amount of partials and click Calculate. Let’s have a look at the first 32 partials:
Number
Frequency
Tone
1
60.000
A#1 plus 39 Cents
2
120.000
A#2 plus 39 Cents
3
180.000
F3 plus 41 Cents
4
240.000
A#3 plus 39 Cents
5
300.000
D4 plus 25 Cents
6
360.000
F4 plus 41 Cents
7
420.000
G#4 plus 8 Cents
8
480.000
A#4 plus 39 Cents
9
540.000
C5 plus 43 Cents
10
600.000
D5 plus 25 Cents
11
660.000
E5 minus 10 Cents
12
720.000
F5 plus 41 Cents
13
780.000
G5 minus 21 Cents
14
840.000
G#5 plus 8 Cents
15
900.000
A5 plus 27 Cents
16
960.000
A#5 plus 39 Cents
17
1020.000
B5 plus 44 Cents
18
1080.000
C6 plus 43 Cents
19
1140.000
C#6 plus 36 Cents
20
1200.000
D6 plus 25 Cents
21
1260.000
D#6 plus 10 Cents
22
1320.000
E6 minus 10 Cents
23
1380.000
F6 minus 33 Cents
24
1440.000
F6 plus 41 Cents
25
1500.000
F#6 plus 12 Cents
26
1560.000
G6 minus 21 Cents
27
1620.000
G6 plus 45 Cents
28
1680.000
G#6 plus 8 Cents
29
1740.000
A6 minus 32 Cents
30
1800.000
A6 plus 27 Cents
31
1860.000
A#6 minus 16 Cents
32
1920.000
A#6 plus 39 Cents
Fundamental: 60 Hz — results for 443 Hz as standard pitch
That’s it. Try it out and feel free to use it whenever you need to work with harmonic series.
Special thanks to Daniel Mayer for checking the results with a SuperCollider patch and for some great advise to make the program’s interface more user-friendly!
Find some ear training exercises in different levels of difficulty at my new music theory repository.
A new website dedicated to music theory which is growing steadily
Working as a lecturer of music theory through the pandemic also meant to digitise a bunch of exercises. Teaching aural theory was particularly challenging as it just didn’t work out so well in the traditional way using the piano a lot and finding solutions together on the board. You’ll probably know how ear training works out in normal times — and let me add that I still prefer teaching it that way, playing a piece on the piano, going around and helping my students taking their individual obstacles. Teaching online really means to find other didactical solutions and also to offer lots of practising materials. Naturally these exercises can still be of use once we have entirely come back to teaching at the campus. Thus I have decided to recycle some of the exercises I have created over the past two years, translate them into English and offer them for free. It’s really great that I’m obvioulsy not the only academic doing so — and not nearly the first one aiming at creating a digital offer for students who would like to get skilled in music theory respectively. In this way the pandemic has really moved things forward.
My repository is still far from finished. It is rather meant to grow steadily. I have until now uploaded several easy and some medium aural training exercises. I have only begun to translate my slideset in fundamentals of music theory (to transfer all the PDF pages into many WordPress posts, tag them appropriately and doing some clearing work will take some time and I’m planning to do this in the summer holidays when I’m tired of orchestrating my new song cycle «Three Nautic Still-Lives» which is to be premiered in April 2023 at the Musikverein in Vienna).
I hope that you will find my repository useful: Please don’t hesitate to ask for some specific exercise or if you have any suggestions. The new website really isn’t meant to become something like a textbook. I’d rather like to consider it a place that can be visited any time, without the need of creating a membership account. Just any time you feel like practising something, feel free to see if there’s something available that can be done on the fly.
In my lecture I will talk about my work «XXI Orakel der Nacht» amongst other things.
Lecture «Utopien ins Trockene bringen» at the Styrian State Conservatory
On Wednesday, May 4 I will have the pleasure of holding a lecture at the Johann Joseph Fux-Conservatory in Graz about my works and how to realise them in concert. I will be talking about the process of composing «XXI Orakel der Nacht» as well as discussing several aspects of how to perform these pieces and what might be the obstacles when aiming at scheduling such pieces in concert.
Furthermore I was asked to talk about how to present one’s works in the internet and to deliver insights into my work as a curator of a concert series for contemporary music.
In the past years, more than once a piece of mine has been considered unplayable or it proved itself very difficult to stage in concert. Most of of my works have been premiered successfully and some of these pieces have been played even several times in the meantime. In my presentation I will try to communicate strategies of how to deal with such works that might be considered difficult or even not playable at the first glance. Perhaps it could motivate young composers to pursue their artistic path even if it turns out to be a very complicated one. This is why I called my lecture «Bringing Utopiae over the finishing line».
Utopien ins Trockene bringen Wednesday, May 4 6:40 PM, J. J. Fux-Conservatory Graz, Neuer Saal
