Erratum Addendum

This piece is based on Marcel Duchamp’s Erratum Musical, composed in 1913, considered to be the first piece of ‘chance music’, predating John Cage’s chance pieces by some 37 years. The original piece is scored for three voices and consists of three short sequences of single pitches.

I have taken the original score and extracted variations by applying the processes of inversion and retrograde – compositional techniques developed by the Second Viennese School for use in twelve tone composition. This results in several new note sequences, which are then transposed to all possible registers of the piano. These are recorded and then played back in random order, with some random deletions, and later processed into 8-channel audio distribution through a Max/MSP patch.

©Gordon Monahan 2009

photos by Kay-Uwe Rosseburg