The master class, which was organized for the students, yielded great results. The young musicians closely observed the process of composing mathematical music in the form of a piece emerging from the sounds of a computer line «before their eyes», and participated in this process in the most active way, asking questions and giving advice.
Mathematical music as a new means of developing compositional skills
The Fifth Essay
This experience has become for many of them a good incentive to compose not only individual melodies with free accompaniment. Beginner composers have come close to the possibility of creating completely independent pieces in various genres and musical forms on the basis of the computer sound lines. S. Filatov-Beckman supported these aspirations in every possible way, believing that this is the main evidence of the awakening of the creative imagination of beginner composers. However, for quite a long time there were no interesting examples approaching the quality of the piece «Barcarolle».
The main difficulty for beginner composers was the correlation of the genre features of music, on the one hand, and following the rules for handling a computer line, on the other hand. Many students could create a certain figurative-genre image of a piece on the basis of sufficient knowledge about the features of a particular genre and some creative imagination. However, it was very difficult to find suitable fragments of a computer sound line for these purposes and to modify them for the intended pieces.
The abundance of possible transformations in the fragments was of particular difficulty: these transformations gave rise to many options. At the same time, it was necessary to observe the condition - not to add unnecessary sounds or remove «uncomfortable» sounds; to repeat or not to repeat the parts and sounds of the fragment; if the line goes step by step up or down, then to decide whether to use this step or somewhere to transfer the sounds of the fragment by an octave jump. The number of options was huge, and this constituted the difficult choice for the beginner composer.
Some students asked S. Filatov-Beckman for concessions - not to follow the computer line completely. But S. A. Filatov-Beckman, an experienced scientist, who himself was accustomed to achieving results in his creative work without deviating from the goal, did not support young musicians in an effort to «facilitate» the process of composing pieces. Elena Sokolovski, a professional composer, agreed with him on this matter. There are many records and notes on this subject in the scientist's archive.
The students' pieces gradually accumulated. Collecting materials for his PhD thesis, S. Filatov-Beckman noted that the quality of pieces created on the basis of the computer lines and constituting the fund of mathematical music is steadily increasing. We found several pieces in the scientist's archive that the researcher considered successful. Let's dwell on one of them.
This piece is a waltz composed by a group of students independently in strict accordance with the computer sound line No. 3. It is written for piano and possesses a «harmonious» character, without pretending to any deep contrasts. Its reprise two-part simple musical form consists of small sections, thematically close to each other, and covers only 34 measures.
