Mind the Gap: Composition and Continuous Musical Spaces
Our first Colloquium of the semester will take place on Friday 2/19 at 3:30pm when we welcome Clifton Callender, a composer from Florida State University. In addition to teaching composition, music theory, and music programming at FSU, Callender serves on the editorial boards for Perspectives of New Music and the Journal of Mathematics for which he was Co-Editor-in-Chief. His talk will discuss emerging mathematically-informed music scholarship and composition. A full description and biography follows.
“Mind the Gap: Composition and continuous musical spaces”
Clifton Callender, a composer from Florida State University
zoom meeting
Meeting ID: 942 7241 4948
Passcode: 266007
While the study of music and mathematics extends to multiple ancient cultures, there has been an explosion of interdisciplinary research and artistic possibilities in recent decades that brings together mathematicians, computer scientists, and musicians. This talk will provide an overview of recent mathematically-informed music scholarship and my own compositional practice, including the links between calculus and musical time, self-similarity and novel approaches to musical counterpoint, statistical approaches to rhythm, and modeling chords and chord progressions with the geometry of quotient spaces.
Clifton Callender is Professor of Composition at Florida State University, teaching composition, music theory, and music programming and computation. In Fall of 2018 he was in residence at the Copland House. His works, which often draw on mathematics, are recorded on the Capstone, New Ariel, and Navona labels. Recent commissions include Chain Reactions, for the 75th commemoration of Chicago Pile 1 (the first nuclear reactor), Canonic Offerings and Hungarian Jazz, for the Bridges Conference on the Arts and Mathematics, gegenschein, for Piotr Szewczyk’s Violin Futura project, and Reasons to Learne to Sing, for the 50th Anniversary of the College Music Society. His music has been recognized by and performed at the Spark Festival, the American Composers Orchestra, SEAMUS, Forecast Music, Composers Inc., Studio 300, the Florida Electracoustic Music Festival, the International Festival of Electroacoustic Music “Primavera en La Habana,” NACUSA Young Composers Competition, the Northern Arizona University Centennial Composition, the North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Conferences, the World Harp Congress in Copenhagen and the ppIANISSIMO festival in Bulgaria. He recently completed a setting of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poem for the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit, Dear Matafele Peinam. Also active in music theory, Callender has published in Science, Perspectives of New Music, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, and Intégraland serves on the editorial boards of Perspectives of New Music and the Journal of Mathematics and Music, for which he served as Co-Editor-in-Chief.
https://virginia.zoom.us/j/94272414948?pwd=bkxFZ0M1MGg2NTBSSk1QbGtyb2d2UT09
Meeting ID: 942 7241 4948
Passcode: 266007
Please call the Music Department at 434.924.3052 for more information.
All events are subject to change.