Doleo Æternus
for computer, musicians and video sculpture

In early 2007 Avant Media premiered Anger in SoHo, NYC. Since its premiere, I have been revising, improving and perfecting this piece, and have renamed the piece Doleo Æternus. This new version incorporates elements of North Indian raga as taught to me by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela and represents the beginning of a performance tradition centered around this piece, and focused on the purity of statement in combining material and process. By mixing live music with a semi-autonomous computer, the simple chords of the piece become a shimmering rhythmic drone that is at once harmonic and melodic.

At its most basic, Doleo Æternus is a cycle of six chords. These chords are held for a long time, and drones are built from them with the aid of a computer. When it comes to the actual performance, the work is structured in two parts: the first a sort of extended Alap section that introduces various perfect fifth and major second intervals, and eventually the minor second, a defining interval in the piece; the second a melodic through-line over which the soloists perform structured and utilized in a similar way to a Gat in rāga performance. These two sections are linked by either an extended piano solo, or an accelerating unison from all of the performers that serves to elucidate the specifics of the computer process.

The rules that define the soloists performance are defined in the same way that one defines a rāga. There is a characteristic scale, based on the Bhairavi Thāt of North Indian Music, although the just intonation tuning we are beginning to use, based almost exclusively on pure fifths, takes it to an earlier and yet newer place. There are characteristic motivic patterns and rising and ascending movements. The majority of the piece utilizes only subsets of the full scale, but the motives, melodies, and patterns of the full scale are always hinted at.

Realizations

World Premiere
November 21, 2009, Wild Project, New York City

Equal Tempered Premiere In Progress
December 5, 2008, International Society of Improvised Music Third Annual Convention, Denver, Colorado