Organic form itself is found, mathematically speaking, to be a function of time. We might call the form of an organism an event in space-time, and not merely a configuration in space. (Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Aristid Lindenmayer: The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants)
Art is all about form. Forms are represented everywhere – in space, on earth, in nature, in society. One has to be able to read and to understand those forms in order to create something new. In my music I like to use ‘found mathematical objects’: simple automatons which build forms over time.
When I encountered Aristid Lindenmayer’s ‘L-systems’ some time ago, I became fascinated with these rules to describe plant forms and growth. The organic development and the self-similarity of the plant forms seemed to be perfectly translatable to music.
That’s how the idea for Kranz was born: a work that uses a simple Lindenmayer axiom, of which I translated the first five recursions (a slowly growing repetitive structure) to a score for piano and string quintet in five parts.
Kranz is dedicated to my dear friend and colleague Willem Boogman.
Audio
Score sample
Scoring
Piano 2 Violins Viola 2 Violoncellos
Duration
11'
More info
Commissioned by Festival Open Systems, Bochum
First performance
November 17, 2005, Bochum (Germany), by Luxembourg Sinfonietta & Marcel Wengler (conductor).