James Tenney: Music for Player Piano

(http://reference.findtarget.com/search/player%20piano)

James Tenney created this piece in 1964. It is stochastic music. Maybe a bit of explanation will help. I will try to keep it simple. Take a musical piece like a process evolving from its first sound to the last one. Each sound represents an event in the evolution from start to end. In a deterministic world, each new sound of the melody is determined by the precedent sounds according to some rules (like the rules of harmony).

In real life, however, the events do not always follow a rule. A new event is not just the consequence of past; there is room for chance. Think a chess and think at backgammon. Believers would say that it's fate. Agnostics would rather say that it's hazard.

Well, stochastic music tries to follow the way of real life. The following sound will come somehow on its own: backgammon rather than chess. For this the composer has to use the computer, to generate randomness.

It sounds weird to emulate nature by using a computer. Here is the thing: the computer does not determine the following sound; it is just doing a probabilistic research and indicates some results. The computer is just a tool helping the composer.

The techniques of computer generated music are diverse: law of large numbers, probability theory, game theory, Boolean algebra, Markovian chain, Poisson law, group theory... okay, you've got the picture. Jim Tenney was a pioneer in the field of computer generated music.

I dedicate this post to Silvia Median, a colleague of mine from the IT R&D Institute in Bucharest, where I have worked till 2002. Silvia Median (who had studied Mathematics at the Bucharest University, with Prof. Moisil) was very interested in the field of computer-generated music.

(video by Juergen Hocker)

(James Tenney)