Finished the pdf transcription of my commission for Defunensemble’s concert in Copenhagen Tuesday May 18. I begun the work in early April in Santiago, and it has been quite a challenge to finish. This is primarily because I have been restricting the compositional material to score features of different emotion labels (tender, heavy, happy) as they are defined by various feature research that we are integrating into the SUM project. It has meant dealing with clashes of my habits – or my musical likings, better said – with the restraints of a particular emotion according to the rule system and previous findings in Juslin’s seminal paper.

Defunensemble

It has been a healthy endeavour artistically as it has shown me the borders of my musical expression when developing a- or free-tonal academic composition. It was very clear that there is a tendency to seek dissonant and disruptive features to get ‘newness’ and those solid avant-garde textures that we have come to identify with contemporary academic composition.