LIDS Colloquium

Creating Musical Variation

Diana Dabby

Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Music

Franklin W. Olin College

Tuesday, April 29^th, 2008
4:15-5:15 p.m.
32-141

There will be a short reception at 3:45 p.m. on the 6th floor of the Dreyfoos Building.

Abstract:
During the 18^th and 19^th centuries, composers often dressed a melody in new attire by weaving additional notes around its thematic tones in order to create a variation. Such ornamentation could enliven and elaborate one or more musical entities. Yet myriad variation techniques existed besides ornamentation, including permutation and combination, as advocated by a number of 18^th-century treatises. More recently, fields such as chaos theory have allowed composers to create new kinds of variations, some of which are reminiscent of earlier combinatorial techniques. One such technique uses a chaotic mapping to make musical variations of an entire work. This technique harnesses a natural mechanism for variability found in the science of chaos—that is, the sensitivity of chaotic trajectories to initial conditions. Two chaotic trajectories map the pitch sequence of a musical score into a variation where the same set (or subset) of pitches appear, but in modified order.

The chaotic mapping can create variations on pieces which employ multiple instruments, as well as infuse a piece with musical attributes, e.g., pitches, outside its own musical event space. Virtually infinite in number, the variations can be close to the original, diverge from it substantially, or achieve degrees of variability between these two extremes. Schenkerian analysis can offer a kind of ‘musical proof’ as to why some of these variations continue to engage listeners. In sum, the technique offers a post-compositional process in which a composer can go on a journey to someplace new or unimagined with an already completed piece.

Biography:
Diana Dabby has taught at MIT, Tufts University and Juilliard, and holds degrees in music and electrical engineering from Vassar, Mills, City College of New York, and MIT. In her doctoral work at MIT, she combined music and engineering in her application of chaos theory to musical variation, which has since been the topic of a number of concert/lectures sponsored by the National Association of Schools of Music, MIT, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, IEEE, FIRST Place of New Hampshire, New Horizons in Science, the International Conference on Complex Systems, and Harvard. She has been heard on NPR member station WBUR-FM (2004) and on NPR’s Weekend Edition (2007). As a concert pianist, Dabby has performed in Weill (Carnegie) Recital Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, Jordan Hall, Symphony Hall Boston, Tanglewood, and abroad. Her recent works include Aerial Silk, A Fire’s Tale (both for piano), and September Quartet, a 5-movement work scored for voices, winds, brass, percussion, violin and piano, commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the founding of Tufts University. She is a founding faculty member and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Music at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, where she teaches orchestration, composition, and electrical engineering, as well as interdisciplinary courses combining art and science.