In the course of tackling Oltremare and several Toumani Diabate pieces, I have consistently hit brick walls of my own poorly organized design. Oltremare, for instance, currently consists of about 30 scattered pages of byzantine notes, a crude amalgam of tabulature, notation and what looks like a chess match from an alternate dimension: E4 ==> F#4 ==> G4 ==> G3 and so on. I will probably procure Sibelius, but I am interested by an unorthodox alternative: Wolfram's fully functional Tower of Babel, Mathematica.
Meet Carl McTague, a cat so fascinating he can quote Ayn Rand and I don't even flinch. McTague is a composer and a good deal more: he's developed something he calls the Hierarchical Functional Inheritance Model, which strikes me as a modern mutant of George Russell's classic work in Lydian Chromatic Concept. I am aware that McTague and Russell have very different systems they arrived at by very different means, but both of them are obtuse & complex theories which, despite being top heavy on abstraction, yield remarkable music in practice. Case in point: 6 Integers, which was executed in Mathematica. I was not expecting it to be nearly so interesting, and I recommend checking out both versions. The first gives you a clearer sense of the logic at work, and the second really fleshes out the prog-rock wankery in the middle.
I am still unpacking all the information in McTague's notes for "Music Through Computation," and will be for quite some time. I have never minded being in over my head, and it was worth the confusing initial read just for the "Helix of Fifths" -- which is a small fraction of what this 88-slide presentation outlines. While computer generated algorithmic music goes back to 1991 and further, McTague is doing unique and impressive work.
Related Reading: The Sound of Numbers: A Tour of Mathematical Music Theory by Rachel Wells Hall.
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