DESCRIPTION:
Composer: Harry Whalley
Conductor: James Lowe

Entangled Music is in five parts or movements, with each movement starting with a short dialogue that introduces some of the ideas and themes of the impending section. The titles are mainly implicit in GEB.

PART IV
GO - Piano Duet
A contemplative section with firefly outbursts. The ancient board game of GO is a strategy game with deceptively simple rules, but these rules generate so much outstanding complexity. Chess master Emanuel Lasker said of GO,

"The rules are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go."

Like Chess, Go is a non-chance combinatorial game, however, unlike chess computers are still fairly rubbish at it. Computer GO is still in its relative infancy and a very different approach than ‘brute force’ is needed to improve. Is true intelligence computable? Douglas Hofstadter once wrote that when a computer is truly more intelligent than a chess master the computer will say “I’m bored of chess, lets talk about poetry”.

I was delighted to find a half point win between an excellent GO player and Computer on KGS go server (gokgs.com) between agotaoxin (Human) and Zen19N (a 12-core Mac Pro programmed by Yoji Ojima).

I took this game as an input, which was divided into two ‘streams’, an algorithmic one and an intuitive one. This section is the confluence of these two approaches, with the material from both being distributed between the two pianos rather than taking a ‘side’ each. This game also generated source material for another composition Clasp together (beta) which used an EEG headset to control an artificial neural network.

KOAN – Ensemble
The most homogenous and ‘orchestral’ sounding section, Koan was written to establish a beautiful dissonance, carefully balanced between the two halves of the ensemble to create a feeling of ambiguity.

Mumon’s commentary:
If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a staff, you ignore the fact. It cannot be expressed with words and cannot be expressed without words. Now say quickly what it is.

Mumon’s Poem:
Holding out the short staff,
He gave an order of life or death.
Positive and negative interwoven,
Even Buddhas and patriarchs cannon escape this attack.

(“Patriarchs” refers to six venerated founders of Zen Buddhism, of which Enō is the last)

Conductor: James Lowe
Violin: Christopher Jones
Violin Kaija Lukas
Viola: Kay Stephen
Cello: Anna Menzies
Contrabass: Andres Kungla
Flute: Alasdair Garrett
Horn in F: Eneko O'Carroll
Bb Clarinet, Bass Clarinet: Alex South
Oboe, Cor Anglais: Arelene Cochrane
Bassoon: Graeme Brown
Bb Clarinet, Bass Clarinet: Pete Furniss
Cello: Clea Friend
Horn in F: Patrick Broderick
Piano: Svetosvlav Todorov
Piano: Paul Harrison

This was part of my major work towards a PhD in Composition from the University of Edinburgh.