Having been a working drummer since the age of 14, I am preoccupied with the nature of time, timing, and temporality; traditionally represented as a horizontal axis. As a composer, one who combines the vertical (harmonic) with the horizontal (Cartesian coordinates in multi-dimensional space-time), my interest remains ostensibly rhythmic in that connotations of the vertical interval are derived from the interaction of pulses (frequencies) – from the granulated and micro-tonal to the philosophical and mathematical concept of an infinite interval.
This enquiry predominantly utilises chromatic/pantonal material. Whilst instrumental pedagogy retains a chromatic prevalence, composition should provide; enabling traditional instrumental pedagogy to remain culturally relevant, beyond a means of historical articulation.
Despite the last 100 post-serial years and the global integration of Eastern & Western musical idioms, music continues to fight for a place at the top table (the quadrivium) rather than as an adjunct to commercial venture that can undermine the consideration of sound and music as “a vast potential reservoir in which a knowledge of the laws of thought and the structured creations of thought may find a completely new medium of materialization, i.e., of communication… the quantity of intelligence carried by the sounds must be the true criterion of the validity of a particular music. ” ( Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Music, 1992, ix).
In brief, what is musical meaning, and how might an interdiscipline study of the interval inform this?
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