To hear on Sunday 18 and 25 December 2011,
2pm - 9pm:
The Geometry of Time (Premiere)
by Bill Alves
Bill Alves on "The Geometry of Time" [13']:
Sounds over loudspeakers in a gallery become an expression of space. Sufis wrote of geometry as a gateway to the soul, and the abstract patterns of Islamic art bring to our senses the numbers of Pythagoras. Musical tones, then, are a geometry of time, represented in this piece by increasingly complex whole number frequency ratios, an exploration up and out from the harmonic series of acoustic sounds.
Bill Alves is a composer, writer, and video artist based in Southern California. He has written extensively for conventional acoustic instruments, non-Western instruments (especially Indonesian gamelan) and electronic media, often integrated with abstract animation. CDs of his audio works include The Terrain of Possibilities (EMF) and Imbal-Imbalan (Spectral Harmonies), and his video works are on the dvd Celestial Dance (Kinetica Video Library). He is the author of Music of the Peoples of the World (Cengage/Schirmer) soon to be in its third edition. He has studied traditional music in Java, Bali, India, and elsewhere and currently directs the HMC American Gamelan, an ensemble of specially tuned Javanese instruments dedicated to the performance of new, non-traditional music. He is one of the organizers of MicroFest, the annual Southern California festival of new music in alternate tunings and teaches at the Claremont Colleges in Southern California.