Doctrine of Chances (1999)
Tape
6:00
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Program Notes
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Doctrine of Chances, the title of which is taken from an 18-century mathematical treatise on probability, re-examines the relations between statistical distribution and form in music written after 1950. The so-called chance composers of the fifties and sixties, represented by Cage, Wolff, Brown, and others, used probabilistic procedures to create sound worlds that were free from what they would regard as doctrinaire approaches to formal organization, as represented by Babbitt and the east coast academic composers. From our vantage point at the end of the century, the differences between these two approaches appear not to be so great as once imagined. Serialists, it has often been argued sometimes too casually applied higher mathematical process without a clear understanding of their structural implication in order to create expressive patterns of richness and complexity. At the same time, chance composers came to incorporate increasingly elaborate sets of rues and conditions governing how chance operations would be employed in their music. Both approaches to creating pattern and complexity are integrated in Doctrine of Chances, which combines the structural clarity of digitally-generated sound with the richness of digitally-processed musical instruments.
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