DESCRIPTION:
0:00 - Tuning
0:30 - 1. Moon
1:17 - 2. Mineral
2:20 - 3. Octahedron
2:59 - 4. Mercury
4:10 - 5. Air
4:34 - 6. Sanguine
5:05 - 7. Vegetable
5:31 - 8. Sun
6:45 - 9. Icosahedron
6:54 - 10. Phlegmatic
7:11 - 11. Water
7:28 - 12. Venus
8:28 - 13. Animal
9:01 - 14. Sphere
12:00 - 15. Body
14:00 - 16. Aether
14:28 - 17. Dodecahedron
16:05 - 18. Mars
16:31 - 19. Fire
16:58 - 20. Choleric
17:17 - 21. Tetrahedron
17:43 - 22. Jupiter
18:24 - 23. Mind
20:09 - 24. Melancholic
20:34 - 25. Earth
21:01 - 26. Saturn
22:16 - 27. Cube
24:09 - 28. Soul

Matt Barber - Interface Chapel (1st version, 2008)

Scott Worthington, Solo Contrabass with Computer
Ossia New Music Ensemble
Eastman Computer Music Center

Please consider purchasing the CD here:
http://www.the-open-space.org/cds.html

The title explains very little of the particulars of the piece, but a great deal of the spirit of its construction.  I have long been fascinated with Western classical cosmology, and how natural philosophers were able to make some very brilliant deductions from the cosmological axioms and the tools of observation they had to work with.  In this piece I represent many of these concepts fairly loosely in music, and provide a space for them to interact musically.  Given the nature of these ideas, I thought a "chapel" might be a nice metaphor for this space in which they "interface" with each other; and of course the title is a play on "Interfaith Chapel."

The titles of the 28 movements tie together concepts and objects in classical and early modern astrology, philosophy, astronomy, etc.  For instance, in Timaeus Plato associates each of the four classical elements with one of the Platonic solids.  In the late 16th century, in his Mysterium Cosmographicum, Johannes Kepler creates a model of the solar system that relates the size of the orbits of each of the planets of the solar system to one of the Platonic solids (this is before he arrived at his famous laws of planetary motion); in his model each of the orbits was situated between nested polyhedra on the surface of inscribed and circumscribed spheres.  Kepler's conception of this is pictured on the cover of this video.  In turn, the elements were often associated with the humors and temperaments, and so forth.  In this piece, any time I sought to emphasize one of these connections, I had the movements overlap, both in time and to a great extent in musical structure as well.