I just completed “Orbits”, the viola and piano piece I described in my previous post. Check out a score sample here!
The tempo sequence (in beats per minute) is 100-120-80. The transitions for the first two are:
100 to 120: eighth note quintuplets become eighths (page 3)
120 to 80: dotted quarters become quarters (pages 8 and 17)
There’s no transition between 80 and 100 for two reasons: the abrupt shift restarts the tempo rotation, and the stuff at quarter = 80 is extremely slow (it’s “deep space” music), so a transition would be harder to define anyway.
It was also a lot of fun seeing how you can fake acceleration and deceleration without actually changing the tempo. I guess it makes sense that I did this, since gravitional pull is measured in acceleration, and leaving gravity out of a piece about the effects of passing space objects wouldn’t make much sense!
[...] Hall at the University of Chicago! I wrote the piece back in June and July of 2009 (and wrote two posts on it back then), so I’m very excited to finally be performing it. Here’s the [...]