Intelligent Designs

Violin, Alto Saxophone and Live Electronics

Score, Parts and Electronics available from

Voice House Publishing

Music Sample: Intelligent Designs [Excerpt]

Program Note:

Intelligent Designs (May 5, 2006) was composed for SWARMIUS. It loosely investigates notions related to evolution and from there derives analogies for growth and change of musical materials. Briefly, identical materials are employed at vastly different levels of scale. This results in contrasting musical textures and surfaces that, though essentially identical, elicit divergent cultural and emotional associations. This exemplifies one of my current inquiries: Can various scientific, anthropological and mathematical paradigms be filtered through wholly musical strategies to reveal unexplored musical results and also shed light on organizational principals in other disciplines? If every musical work, no matter how humble, is essentially an exploration in cognition, what can we learn from the experiment?

In this musical experiment hip-hop-like textures are wedded willy nilly with Gamelan-like textures: unlikely but inevitable products of invisible underlying forces. The musical company that this odd-couple keeps includes jazz, rock, Gypsy, Middle-Eastern, German classical and vaudeville, like the sparkling facets of daily life.

So what is the lesson? If you have any ideas, please send them to me! We can compare notes — I will tell you what I think!

Mainly I hope that Intelligent Designs is a barometer for our time; a classical music that mirrors and embraces its milieu, and that is comfortable in classical halls as well as nightspots.

The electronic portion comprises raw materials from the current San Diego urban soundscape: construction noises such as jack hammers, pneumatic power staplers, distant machine-shop grinder ambiences; a large, beautiful ceramic Mexican vase, harmonic spectra from Chinese gongs, plus the transfigured sounds of the musicians for whom the work was specifically composed and a few surprises.

Jozefius Vaatierz Rattus, May 5, 2006


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