IVAR FROUNBERG composer/works A Pattern of Timeless Motion (1989)

A Pattern of Timeless Motion was commissioned by DIEM for the Aarhus Computer Music Festival through the Danish Art Council and produced in the studio of DIEM.

The title is a quasi quote from T.S.Eliott’s Four Quartets, which has provided inspiration for the majority of my works from "Multiple Forms" (1986) to Time and the Bell (1991). I was fascinated by dealing with the central aspect of time, but also the accepted presence of the paradox as a means of acquiring knowledge. Music can contain irreconcilable states that, despite their mutual exclusion, are present simultaneously as perceptible entities. But music also encompasses vitalization of elementary relationships such as time-space relativity: the time quantity 1 millisecond is a perceptible time and thus rhythm, but it is also an expression of space, namely the distance of about one foot that delays the sound before it reaches our ears. Only the media of electro-acoustic music can dramatize this effectively.

As something new for me I have taken an approach, which I will call non-linear rhythm. Instead of proportional rhythmic transformations I utilize algorithmic ones. Rhythms arise in a continuously varying process that retains structural identity by means of the algorithm. The result is not unlike fractal structures. Other processes develop toward or away from chaos, and the main tendencies of the work take place on a plane between chaos, pulse and space.

Ivar Frounberg.