2020 and 2021 were pretty crazy years, and not the most conducive to finding periods of concentration in which to compose music. In addition to the events we were all experiencing, Emily and I had our first child, Hugo – an absolute gem of a human being for sure, but also rather time-consuming. However, I did, ever-so-slowly, manage to finish one big piece: Lunar Trajectories, for augmented piano. At just over 20 minutes, it's one of the longest pieces I've written, and it required a whole new approach to my compositional workflow. Here's a virtual performance I did recently on my new MIDI-capable piano:

For audio only, click here.

Lunar trajectories started from a discussion I had with my friend Anthony Garcia. I was telling him how my favorite kinds of concerts combine new music and old music, and mentioned that I'd been recently learning the whole Moonlight Sonata as an attempt to fulfill a childhood dream. Unrelatedly, I was also telling him about my Python libraries for music composition, and how I wanted to get the word out about what they could do. The net result of all of this was that I walked out of the conversation interested in making a piece for interactive piano based on the Moonlight Sonata, using these libraries.

I quickly mocked up a program that would respond to every pitch I played with the notes that followed the first appearance of that pitch in the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. The results were exciting, and it didn't take too long to turn them into a short piece. So I figured, why not do something similar with the second and third movements?

For the second movement, I decided to take a different tack. I'm particularly attracted to the suspensions in the second movement, so I set out to write a program that would allow the music to flow through all of these suspensions and resolutions. The program echoes each note I play and then ultimately resolves it following the trajectory of one of the movement's many suspensions. This movement took considerably longer and then the first to write: the program was more complicated, and it's always harder to write something that fits with what you've already written than it is when you're starting from scratch.

By far the most complicated and time-consuming movement, though, was the third movement. Here, the program listens for short gestures and expands them into sweeping arpeggios and trills. I explored countless presets for the program — shaping the pitch trajectory, tempo acceleration and deceleration, and scale interpolation of the extrapolated gesture — and made it possible to cycle between these presets with a foot pedal. The biggest challenge of all, though, was finding a workflow: sometimes I wrote material out by hand, other times I recorded improvisations into the computer, and at one point I actually found myself photocopying a bunch of messy handwritten pages and literally cutting and pasting with scissors and tape.

Without a doubt, this has been one of my most ambitious pieces, with the writing process spanning over two years. Maybe one day I'll learn my lesson and write a piece using familiar techniques and workflows, rather than reinventing everything from the ground up each time. Maybe.