At Winter's
Edge
This work was influenced
by the writings of Wallace Berry, a Canadian music theorist
and composer. He approached musical
form from it’s “architectonic structure” of
organization, not in a traditional sense, but examining
the symmetry of musical phrase structure and it’s reciprocal
effect that each cell has on future events within the
musical form. He also demonstrated the importance of
being aware of all aspects of unity and proportion found
within musical form, the distinction between knowing
and feeling, and insight and reaction, the cognitive
level of organization opposed to the simpler sensory
apprehension of musical form.
The organic approach to form that I
began to sense from the book "Strucural Functions
in Music" by Wallace Berry was that of a universal
direction that is connected to all physical growth
from a simple cellular structure to more complex organisms.
The orchestral work “At Winters Edge” began as a study
of a snowflake and the branch of physics called “self
assembly”. Self assembly understands the importance
of the environment to help create organisms which occur
naturally in nature such as plants, animals, and snowflakes.
The symmetry of a snowflake translates geometrically
as an L- based system fractal, specifically, a well
known self- similar fractal called the “Koch
curve” named after Niels von Koch, 1870-1924.
My work on “At Winter’s Edge” was focused
on defining relationships between physics and music
that helped predict the topological equivalent inherent
in both. I suspected that symmetry, continuity, and
coherence in music has a “personal dimension”
relating to the composer’s natural ability to internally
formulate their “interior order” of rhythm and structure.
This physical component was taken into consideration
when examining symmetry in musical structure throughout
this work with the understanding that structure in music
is a natural process, and all organic growth
has an underlying connection that is universal in all
forms of growth and physical development.
Please contact
the composer for performance scores.
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