Output details

In the Highest

Medium Symphony Orchestra

Duration 15 minutes

Funded/Supported by Tampere Conservatoire of Music, Tampere, Finland

In collaboration with Ari Angervo

The central aim of the commission from the Tampere Conservatoire in Tampere, Finalnd was to create a work that would re-contextualise aspects of Sibelius’ 2nd 5th and 7th Symphonies and in particular what might be termed as the nocturnal musical topics of these works.

Gestures from the 2nd 5th and 7th symphonies by Jean Sibelius were modeled, as well as other orchestral works with ‘nocturnal’ associations/textures or motif types by composers such as Berio, Nono, Dallapiccola, Xenakis, Varese, Takemitsu, Grisey, Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg.

In the Highest uses the Gloria for the Blessed Virgin, from the Liber Usualis as a harmonic and motivic starting point as well delivering sectional demarcation points.

Methodology/Outcome

Using topic analysis, and using algorithmic composition to manipulate musical topics, Davismoon created a synthesis of Saariaho and Sibelius using algorithmic compositional methods, instead of simply intuitive compositional methods to generate this synthesis. By thinking of topics as ‘found sounds’ the piece uses hierarchic Markovian agorithm as a “search engine”, combining the topic elements in a new and structurally related way.

Using PWGL algorithmic composition software, I constructed a network of ‘patches’ that, in a hierarchic Markovian sense, assisted in the modelling of the piece. On the micro level various types of nocturnal music topic types were modelled including their interior rhythmic and motivic nature, which changed over time; while on the macro level the appearance, development, interplay and disappearance of these topic types were controlled by probabilistic hierarchic Markovian algorithms.