ACOF 2002 Participant - Toby Wren

Toby Wren

Toby Wren's Difference Engine No. 1, was a composition written for ACOF 2002.

 

...Each individual attack point in the piece can then be subdivided further using expanding and contracting rhythms. In this way the whole form can contain many smaller versions of itself - much like a spiders web...

Program Notes - Difference Engine No. 1

Difference Engine was written in an extremely short space of time around the beginning of August in 2002. The groundwork for the piece evolved over a six month period - twelve different drafts of completely different pieces which all led to dead ends. There were certain things common with the discarded drafts, which were consolidated, but the real beginning point was the plotting of the structure. I have always been interested in clear structures that defy traditional forms. Difference Engine contains markers – attack points - which expand from 1 to a prime number (for example, 17 in the first section) and then contract using only prime numbers (P) back to 1. A chord is repeated after one second, then two, then three and so on. At the start of the piece this is played by the front desk of the violins and the clarinets and bassoons. The entire form of the work can be written as follows:

1 – 17P – 1 – 23P – 1 – 11

The attraction for me with this very simple device is that it creates an audible, yet very simple structure with immense depth. Each individual attack point in the piece can then be subdivided further using expanding and contracting rhythms. In this way the whole form can contain many smaller versions of itself - much like a spiders web. Listen for the flutes and oboes and later the glockenspiel and harp which play reduced versions of the opening figure.

Difference Engine No 1 was the name of a machine invented by Charles Babbage in 1822. It was the first plan for what we call a calculator – a machine about the size of a bed which was never completed. He went on to design another difference engine and perhaps most significantly, an Analytical Engine which was capable of solving complex problems by reading specially designed punch cards. The similarities with the first prototypes of the modern computer are striking, but Babbage’s plans were written more than a hundred years earlier.

The writing of this piece involved some fairly complicated mathematics. It was not meant to be a cold or analytical piece, however. It is about things that I love – ongoing fascinations, with mathematics, Mahler, funk music, counterpoint, Indian tala, large scale forms and certain pitch materials. A romance with numbers, proportion and the orchestra.

Composition Diary - May 2002

I have been working on the premise that I should get a lot of ideas out quickly and then choose the best rather than agonise over every idea that leaves my pen. Consequently I have a big pile of unrelated ideas.

My piece thus far seems to be an extension of two related concepts. The first a discussion of the dialogue between music and law ‘when the modes of music change, the laws of the state always change with them’ (Plato, The Republic, 428BC) and the second, felt by all artists at some stage, that art in itself is futile (‘our people cannot use this garbage as a tool of their ideology’, Nikita Kruschev). The development of these ideas into the premise of a piece is related to my own feelings about detention centers. Possible extensions of Plato include investigation into brain responses to different modes, or textures in music. Once classified, different points of law could be adressed with musical textures. The aim would be to annotate the score with legal challenges to specific points of legislation. The idea of course, however implausible is to create a work which, when heard, changes the mind of the listener on the subject of jailing innocent people. Built into this is an idea of the critical mass of people required to change the overall view of a society. Which brings us back to futility.

Musically, I am working on a set of ideas, which will not all make the final piece. At the moment I have a very slow and sparse waltz, a post Mahler sort of interlude, an orchestration trick which causes an aural illusion, and a really dense full-on texture based on musical mapping of catscans. The waltz is winning, not because I like waltzes, but because of the way it exploits a concept of spatial counterpoint that I first made sketches for at last year’s ACOF.