…drift… selected for music since 1900 conference

My composition for piano “…drift…” has been selected for inclusion in the Thirteenth International Conference on Music Since 1900 to be hosted by the Department of Musicology at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven Belgium. The conference will take place September 13 ~ 15, 2024. I will do a presentation on the compositional techniques used in “…drift…”, followed by a live performance by pianist Tomoko Deguchi. The compositional techniques used in “…drift…” draw on the theory of genetic drift. Genetic drift is a mechanism of evolution that introduces change in species due to the change in the frequency of an existing gene in a population due to random chance as opposed to natural selection which is driven by external changes in the environment that favor genetic traits that are best adapted to those changes. I was intrigued by the idea of a composition whose core materials (DNA if you like) undergo gradual or sudden changes that result in variants of those materials regardless of the musical context in which they exist. “…drift…” also moves through several of my compositional approaches or styles, resulting in a music that ‘drifts’ through variants and styles and ends up in a place different from where it began, but is somehow inevitable.

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