(7x7)7 (2006)- generative music mobile for Jürgen Messensee

Generative music mobile, accompanying an art projection by Jürgen Messensee, shown at the Essl Museum (Klosterneuburg/Vienna) in 2006. Info: http://www.essl.at/works/7x7x7.html In his so-called art projection "Portrait E.", the painter Jürgen Messensee conducts an unusual experiment: a photo of a painting is deprived of its resting static state. Its parts slowly begin to shift, turning and interlocking and forming a three-dimensional spatial structure that moves in time. Through this process the iconic object becomes liquid, gaining two further dimensions with the inclusion of spatial depth and the flow of time. This approach is closely connected with my own compositional thinking, since I often start with static sound material (so-called "samples") in my computer-generated realtime compositions but transfer them into fluid processes through specially developed compositional algorithms. Panta Rhei - a sound environment for Jürgen Messensee's installation "Piscina di Venere" - testifies to this. It is the opposite path that I take in (7x7)7. Where Messensee gradually dissolves an existing whole, transferring it into a spatial lapse of time, my sound environment consists of 49 pre-composed musical motifs (taken from 7x7 for 4 clarinets), which were played beforehand by a bass clarinet and recorded digitally. With the help of a random-controlled algorithm, these digitally stored basic elements are recomposed in respectively new combinations, from which composite sound figures emerge, which all recur - despite their differences - on the same harmonic source material: an eight-part all-interval series that is composed of constantly decreasing intervals and is thus reminiscent of the structure of an overtone series, but without being bound to tonality.