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Particle Partita

Notes

The composition of the work passed-through several key stages, each being a process of refinement and ‘selection’. Making a piece inspired by a series of scientific discoveries, including theory-experiment-verification, it would of course be possible to use the mathematics as an analogue for related structural and formal musical laws and properties, such as pitch, duration, amplitude, and velocity. Such a process, however, would not have reflected more than the quantifiable and qualitative aspects of the theories and phenomena, but I wanted this work to do rather more than that!

The opening movement, the Democritus Question, for example, raises fascinating issues of form and argument; those current to the ancient Greeks and embedded in philosophy and aesthetics, as well as mathematics. Consequently, rather than simply translating the famous ‘question’ of division of something into smaller and smaller fractions of itself (where a number of motifs could have been halved in duration until so close to each other that they were indivisible), I chose to deal with a more comprehensive aspect of Greek mathematics, and made connections with more than just a theory about atoms. Given the context in which the Democritus Question was employed, the first movement translates theories of the properties of matter at the time including textures, colour-related issues, size, geometry, and other associated perspectives on form current in ancient Greek research and practice. I knew, from the outset, that a chronology of particle physics would have a relationship to and with what in music is called theme and variations.

For this reason, the opening movement forms a kind of ‘cluster’ of themes (motifs of short duration and in varying degrees of complexity), which will re-appear in all subsequent movements as each particle (and energy paradigms associated with them) is treated. Once the atom had been accepted as a kind of foundation-core of matter, its sub-atomic particles become materials that are related-to that core yet which behave with forms of energy and ‘trace’ which differentiate each from the other.

Not until the 20th century did it become possible to ‘map’ the actual behaviours of particles. These ‘maps’ illustrate various conditions, actions and reactions of particles. I have already mentioned the analogues which I devised in order to invent music responsive to particle physics. The principal analogues (in my music), are as follows:-

1. A single note (pitch) represents a small ‘parcel’ of sonic energy; those of the shortest duration being particles of smaller mass. Further, the higher the pitch, the less harmonic and partial resonance it has and consequently is treated by me as possessing ‘negative’ rather than positive force on the definition (aurally) of the pitch. Dynamic variation (ppp-fff) represent energy-dynamics which can also be employed as quantum-shifts in the passage of a particle. (see (2)below, for descriptions of the representation(s) of those ‘lines’ traceable in particle reactions.                                                                                  cont.