Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

'Reflexiones, refracciones y difracciones' or 'Reflections, Refractions, and Diffractions' was commissioned by Chilean clarinettist Kathya Galleguillos Díaz (Santiago, Chile), and serves as an exploration of the musical implications of indeterminacy in direct relation to the multi-dimensional physics phenomena of water, sound and light waves, or "a disturbance that propagates through space." The work utilizes algorithmic composition, or 'automated composition' as a method for music composition to develop its conceptual basis in conjunction with the symmetrical formation of one of Nicolas Slonimsky's (1894-1995) 'Scales by Interpolation' as presented in American minimalist composer and music theorist (also former student of Morton Feldman) Tom Johnson's publication Other Harmony: Beyond Tonal and Atonal (2014). According to the online 'The Physics Classroom Project': "Reflection, refraction and diffraction are all boundary behaviours of waves associated with the bending of the path of a wave. The bending of the path is an observable behaviour when the medium is a two- or three-dimensional medium. Reflection occurs when there is a bouncing off of a barrier. Reflection of waves off straight barriers follows the law of reflection. Reflection of waves off parabolic barriers results in the convergence of the waves at a focal point. Refraction is the change in direction of waves that occurs when waves travel from one medium to another. Refraction is always accompanied by a wavelength and speed change. Diffraction is the bending of waves around obstacles and openings. The amount of diffraction increases with increasing wavelength." 'Reflexiones, refracciones y difracciones' attempts to present a musical depiction of the behaviour of waves, and in particular an artistic interpretation of the reflection of water waves off of straight and curved surfaces. The work takes the refractive indices of three materials (glass: 1.52 - "ordinary crown glass, when illuminated by white light, has an index of refraction of 1.52, whereas medium flint glass has an RI of 1.63 and acrylic has an 1.49 index of refraction"; air: 1.0003; water: 1.333) into account to construct a set of tempo relationships, or metric modulations that act as a developmental tool for momentum (and aleatoricism) in the overall structure.

Work Details

Year: 2022

Instrumentation: Bass clarinet.

Duration: 8 min.

Difficulty: Advanced — Professional

Commission note: Commissioned by Kathya Galleguillos Díaz (Santiago, Chile)

The composer notes the following styles, genres, influences, etc in relation to this work:

Reflections, Refractions, and Diffractions Nicolas Slonimsky (1894-1995) Tom Johnson’s publication Other Harmony: Beyond Tonal and Atonal (2014) Stefan Hollos and J. Richard Hollos Combinatoriality Algorithmic Composition Single- and Multi-State Probabilistic Automatons