for piano and computer-generated sound, ca. 13 min.
Brendan White, piano
Ciminelli Hall, Eastman School of Music, Rochester, US, Oct 2011
Lotus on Dense Orbit for piano and computer-generated sound was composed during the spring of 2012. The music mainly depicts the image of lotus in the moonlight on the rippling water. To describe the myriad waves and reflected/refracted lights, I adopted the Chaos and Fractal theory to create various series of numbers which make the multiple periods of repeating cycles; these are called as attracting periodic fixed points in the Chaos theory. In the piece, there is no distinction between the lotus, moonlight, and water-waves, as in Buddhism, which is called nondualism. They are all sounds and lights based on the same material, which is the overtone series from the progression of fundamentals: A-C-D-E, from which I depicted the image of emerging lotus from the waves of light and water. At the second half of the piece (which is not recorded here), the lotus suddenly breaks up into the infinite number of particles of lights scattered into the air, and then submerged into the waves of time and light.
For programming, sequencing, and performance, I used CSound, Score11, Logic, and PureData. (all 2011 version)
