Unforeseen Events

• View Finder
• Fishing for Complements
• Witch Grass
• Canyon
• Harbinger
• Crisscrossed Eights
• Ein Glaesele Warems

Unforeseen Events is the latest of many pieces Behrman has made with computer software designed to interact in real time with a solo performer. The four sections recorded here were made specifically with Ben Neill’s performance style in mind. The electronic timbres are intended to complement the sounds of his instrument—the admirable and humorous mutantrumpet, with its three separately-mutable and playable bells. Refractive Light consists of three small pieces based on an interweaving and overlapping of simple phrases. A musician strikes pitches which trigger responses in the form of sustained tones. The tones die out after a few seconds. While a tone is on it deflects the pitches of other “on” tones, so that harmonic changes occur at the on-and-off edges of overlappping layers. The idea can give rise to a kind of fanning or breathing rhythm which adapts itself to different styles of playing, and to a harmonic vocabulary with dozens or scores of family members.

David Behrman, electronics

On the Other Ocean

• On the Other Ocean
• Figure in a Clearing

On the Other Ocean is an improvisation by Maggi Payne and Arthur Stidfole centered around six pitches which, when they are played, activate electronic pitch-sensing circuits connected to the "interrupt" line and input ports of a microcomputer, Kim-1. The microcomputer can sense the order and timing in which the six pitches are played and can react by sending harmony-changing messages to two handmade music synthesizers. The relationship between the two musicians and the computer is an interactive one, with the computer changing the electronically-produced harmonies in response to what the musicians play, and the musicians influenced in their improvising by what the computer does.

Figure in a Clearing, made a few months before On the Other Ocean, was the first piece of Behrman's to use a computer for music. For Figure, the Kim-1 ran a program which varied the time intervals between chord changes. The time intervals were modelled on the motion of a satellite in falling elliptical orbit about a planet. David Gibson's only "score" was a list of 6 pitches to be used in performance, and a request that he not speed up when the computer-controlled rhythm did. The timbral richness and concentrated eloquence of his playing sprang from his own sources.

Charming booklet notes by David Behrman.

David Behrman, electronics, Kim-1 microcomputer
Maggi Payne, flute
Arthur Stidfole, bassoon
David Gibson, cello
Recording engineers: “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Richard Lainhart

Leapaday Night

• Leapaday Night, Scenes 1,2, and 3
• A Traveller’s Dream Journal, Setting A and B
• Interspecies’ Smalltalk, Part 1 and 2

A series of three pieces/suites; Leapday Night, A Traveler's Dream Journa', and Interspecies Smalltalk involving Rhys Chatham/Ben Neill (on trumpet/mutantrumpet), Fluxus mainstay Takehisa Kosugi (violin), and Behrman himself on electronics. Behrman creates thickly layered liquid sounds utilizing this complex computer music system which absorbs, actually hears, the sounds of instrumentalists, then plays off their improvisations with its own synthesized reactions. The system consists of pitch sensors (“ears” with which it listens to the performing musicians), various music synthesizers (some homemade), a computer graphics color video display and a personal computer. “Heavy period-synth float with bare accompaniment, thankfully just-pre DX-7.”

David Behrman, electronics
Takehisa Kosugi, violin
Ben Neill and Rhys Chatham, trumpets