josh kopeček

The title of this recalls Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture. I have been working on this for quite some time.

A writeup of methods for calculating dissonance.

I wrote, as part of my Masters, an extended essay on the subject of dissonance. The proposal was that dissonance could be objectified, and subsequently used as a musical parameter. At the time I did not have at my disposal the means to be able to investigate this further, and as a result the findings were more theoretical in nature.

Rationale

I have always felt that dissonance was as strong a musical parameter as timbre, register or even harmony. However, it has always been approached from a traditional point of view, that is to say, subjectively: with precedence given to the ear (hegemony of the ear). “The introduction of polyphony was regarded as dissonant a millennium ago”, clearly suggesting that the boundaries for what is considered dissonant have moved considerably in the intervening years. Dissonance, from composition to the appraisal of music, has been subjectively assessed; other areas of music have been heavily academicised, harmony being the obvious example, and subjected to heavy scrutiny and intellectual rigor from the outset of musical notation. So why not dissonance?

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I read Sir Nick Serota’s article a couple of days ago in the Guardian with some interest. What particularly struck me was his mention of an “inevitable … savage reduction in support for individual writers, artists and composers”.

It strikes me this is not the best climate to be a composer, and his bleak picture of the future of the arts over the next few years compares well with what I have read elsewhere. He talks of a “discouragement of innovation”, things which Britain has been particularly good at, especially in sustaining the smaller art entities that actually contribute to a thriving scene. With the Arts Council taking massive cuts (possibly up to 30%) it may be time to either put away the score paper or do something radically different.

Finally I got around to changing The Monk’s Lesson recording to the version recorded with Christine Clancy at EMS earlier this year. You can listen to the stereo mix here (the original is quadrophonic). I strongly recommend you listen on headphones or with decent monitoring. I recorded all the samples for the electronics (and the recorded flute part) in 192khz at 24bit and did all my processing at full resolution. The result was a clarity and precision which I hadn’t achieved with previous works.

The Monk’s Lesson by joshkopecek