The War on the Critical Condition. Volume 2. Piano Games, Artistic experimentation and new composition

Abstract

In my so called 'serious' research, (that into best practice realization of ancient and medieval music), a major theme has been the preparation of multiple realizations of a text or musical work, something that can be defined as music that has no critical or singular edition. This premise has had a profound effect on both my realized early music and new art music composition. This paper continues earlier research into the process of writing multiple compositions from a singular source. In This part of the experiment has involved writing a series of simple piano preludes, recording them on a MIDI instrument and then experimenting to see whether new compositions can be created without changing a single note of the score. In addition this is being done without audio processing, looking at whether the algorithmic potentials in MIDI can afford true composition in an art music sense. This project is being run wholly within a commercially available Digital Audio Workstation.