Tangled

Notes on the piece:

Tangled is a duet for solo pianist and live signal processing. The piece is a musical reflection upon the general intertwined relationships of humans, nature and music, and in particular how these elements interact during the summers at the Tanglewood Music Festival. In performance of Tangled, the partials of the piano are tracked and their frequencies and amplitudes are used to affect various parameters of the signal processing. This signal processing is applied to the piano itself, as well as five prerecorded samples of birds, insects, humans and the bell on the Tanglewood grounds. Because every piano, the attack of each pianist and variations in the exact moment of cue triggering will result in differences in the readings of harmonic partials, each performance of Tangled is slightly different. As the tracked partials are used to affect delay times, transpositions and granular constructs, each programmed event occurs, but does so with a degree of musical freedom. This allows the pianist to perform with the electronics, not alongside them. Tangled’s processing, which features the use of AppleSauce, a patch designed by the composer to create realtime granular resynthesis, was programmed entirely in Max/MSP. The piece was premiered at the 2009 Boston University Collaborative Piano Project concert, marking the first time this event recognized an electronic component as a duet partner.


© Justin Casinghino 2013