FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

In May of 1999 I happened to be in Prague for the first performance of Diamonds, a new work for three orchestras. Petr Kotik, who had commissioned the work for The Orchestra of the SEM Ensemble and the Janacek Philharmonic, had organized two orchestral concerts for the Prague Spring Festival. The first had the title Music in Space. Besides Diamonds, it included Earle Brown's Modules I, II, III,· two Canzoni from the Sacrae symphoniae of Giovanni Gabrieli; and Stockhausen's Gruppen. While I was there I had lunch at the Maly [small] Buddha, a vegetarian restaurant near the Hradcany Castle, with pianist Joseph Kubera and singer Thomas Buckner. Joe was the solo pianist in Gruppen and Tom was soloist in Roscoe Mitchell's Fallen Heroes, a featured work on the second concert. The meal was memorable. Never had I tasted vegetarian food so fragrant and delicious. I highly recommend the Maly Buddha to all my friends. (Uvoz 46, Prague 1, Hradcany, Tel/Fax: 02-20513894.) Later that summer I started working on a commission from Tom Buckner for a new work for baritone voice. I immediately thought of writing a song cycle for voice and piano, a work that Tom andJoe could perform. For several years I have been developing a method of composition in which voices and instruments sustain tones against pure-wave oscillators, creating audible beats that occur when two or more closely tuned sound waves coincide. I use electronically generated waves because their purity (no overtones) produces vivid beating against the richer, more complex instrumental sounds. I began experimenting with this phenomenon in the early '80s, when performers started asking me for works. I wanted to make music for conventional instruments with the same aesthetic that informed my earlier electronic pieces (which often explored brain waves, echoes, and room resonances). I have always been drawn to sound that does work, that causes something physical to happen. There are two ways I go about this: 1) sustain one or more pure waves and ask the performer to micro tune tones against them, causing beats at various speeds (the farther apart, the faster the beating; at unison no beating occurs); and 2) design oscillator-sweeps against which the players sustain fixed tones. Since the waves are in constant motion, the beating speeds continually change. In Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas (1984), a series of eleven solos and a duet, players detune sustained pitches around one or more stationary waves. I didn't specify exact tunings-that would have been impossible for the players to execute;