Play I[-III]

Play I[-III] is composed solely utilizing voice sounds and words recorded by four performers. The source material is a play written by Gertrude Stein, in which stage directions are freely intermixed with lines, and (typically of Stein) the words themselves make sense and almost, but not quite, form coherent sentences. They also suggest a kind of logic for each individual character but don’t seem to relate to each other.

As I began composing this piece, I was reading about chaos theory and strange attractors. It struck me that Stein’s approach to language was similar to strange attractors. For example, drops of water falling from a leaky sink can appear to be regular but vary in small amounts so that it can be difficult to precisely predict when the next drip will fall. This is similar to the “butterfly effect” in which it’s said that a tiny gust of wind from a butterfly can cause a hurricane on the other side of the globe, but not every flap of wings results in a hurricane.

Similarly, Stein’s use of language is both predictable and utterly unpredictable.

When composing this piece, I used aspects of the Lorenz and Henon attractors to control various aspects of the recordings, from phonemes to rhythm to large scale structural elements. This was in an effort to replicate the style of Stein’s original play.

Is it critical to hear the operation of the strange attractors in order to understand Play I-{III]? No. Fitting with my approach to composition, the listener is free to take from the piece whatever they wish. I used the strict mathematical operations as a discipline to help me make musical decisions, but the end result was more interesting to me than the process of composition.