Rehearsal

Rehearsal is a simple composition based on recordings collected during the rehearsal of my Quartet for Strings O.24. It it is made up of 3 types of materials: short spoken sections (S), short sections containing individual instruments rehearsal snippets and tuning (F), and longer sections with the full ensemble (P). The materials are overlapped using a form rule that is derived from the following graph:

In the graph the gold, aquamarine and blu lines indicate the number of elements to be taken from S, F and P respectively, at any given time. For example, at time zero there are 2 elements each from S and F, but no elements from P; at time 100 there are about 4 elements from P and F, but no elements from S. The magenta colored line indicates the total number of elements resulting from overlapping the elements from S, F and P. The lines are just cosine and log-normal functions, and I sample the curves every 180 seconds, rounding off the values to integers, to obtain the numbers of elements to overlap in the piece. Below is the resulting list:

 

where numbers in square brackets indicate the time interval (in steps of 3 seconds), and the other numbers are for F, S, and P. I used some additional little tricks, a bit of cheating, as well as Peak, a bit of Spear, and Final Cut to put the final composition together. Overall very simple but, at least for me, instructive.