Text, including the two scores - Columbia University Department of ...

Commentary What follows are ruminations; some have bubbled in my mind for some time, while many have surfaced in the writing of these two concert works (though not all are directly relatable to them). I pose more questions than I 3.
answers, along with implicit suggestions for my own future investigations. In previous writings [5], I have discussed computer compositional aims as creating one’s own path between computational layers of abstraction. In the give
sense, this journey takes us from hardware bits to assembly code to programming languages to applications, user interfaces, and operating grandest
These layers are the geologic record of computer development, with a history of tools and methods for traversing them. Any large program contains its own unique hierarchy of structures, ranging from low-level (working with primitive-type variables, directly accessing relevant memory and hardware, systems.
to high-level (creating large-scale modular abstractions with userdefinable properties and behavior). The parallels to composition (or, at least, to modes of composition with hierarchical or layered structures), seem evident. A traditional composer may etc),
subvert, or recreate the boundaries and paths between musical abstractions (i.e. pitches abstracting to tonality, or momentary properties to use,
form, etc) to play with an audience’s sense of cause and effect; so too may a programmer define his or her own correlations and causations. In the discrete formulations of computer language, the conceptual abstractions in the mind of the composer must be transcribed into an objectively
large-scale
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