John ffitch

John ffitch was definitely born after WWII, in that part of the United
Kingdom which is God's own county, certainly educated at an East Anglian
university in the sixties, and despite his long hair and beard, and the
uncertain spelling of his name, was never a hippie. His entire professional
career has been as an academic mathematician/computer scientist, and for
most of that time he has held the Chair of Software Engineering at Bath, a
subject about which he knows little. His main interests have been in
Relativity, Planetary Astronomy, Computer Algebra and LISP, but he has been
known to dabble widely, for example in tank warfare, Latin poetry, arabic
linguistics, and company management, all with some lack of success.
Strangely enough he won the Adams Prize for Mathematics 20 years ago.
Hobbies include maintaining Csound and receiving e-mail.

Drums and Different Canons #1

Prelude; Henon; Gruneberg; Distance; Prelude

The initial idea from which this work spread was a short sequence of notes
taken from a mapping of the Henon (chaos) differential equation onto pitch
and duration. Certain themes in it suggested to me a piece, which developed
into the current manifestation, although it has changed a great deal. The
title is an echo of the well known quotation from Thoreau and the repetitive
canon like structure of this differential equation. The work is in three
movements, the second and third played without a break, with an introductory
and closing fanfare.

The first movement, the longest, is subtitled Henon, and is a slow statement
of the main musical material, derived from the Henon equation. It is played
mainly on a marimba-like instrument, with injections from other timbres,
triggered by certain events, and taking material from the Torus chaos
function. An arbitrary limit of 500 events was chosen, the 500th event being
marked by a different sound.

The second movement was conceived on a mountain in Austria called Gruneberg,
above the town of Gmunden, which I climbed on a rainy day in September,
while listening to some Xenakis on a walkman. The score is actually the same
events as the first movement, but the instruments are drums, played at about
twice the speed, with much stereo modifications, and there are other
unstable motions of timbre.

The same score is used for the last movement, but the introduction of
glissandi changes the mood to a distant memory of Gruneberg. The inspiration
was a distant view of hills, both from Gruneberg and from my house. It is
quieter, and I hope more reflective.

The pitches are all taken from an 100ET scale. The piece was realised in a
mixture of ANSI C and CSound. The work took about 15 months to write, and
lasts about 7 minutes.

JPff
12 June 1994