jwilzewske: ontology

Showing posts with label ontology. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Save The Music!: Writing Refactorable Compositions and ‘Refactor’ Methods

I n my previous CMT post, I confided a genuine ‘worry’ about the perishability of computer and electroacoustic compositions. And people laugh at this.

N otwithstanding the half-jesting comment above that delights in the fact that computer/electroacoustic works may become unperformable due to technology change, and notwithstanding that some musical works are written deliberately to be topical/of-a-time/perishable. They do not aspire to 200-year or 500-year relevance. Further notwithstanding that some composers’ goal is such prolific runtime indirection and aleatorics that there is no possibility of ‘rehearsals’ in the conventional sense, only performance—and ad hoc ‘thrownness’. Notwithstanding the fact that ‘you-shoulda-been-there!’ installation art and ‘one-time happenings’ may be a legitimate aim for some.

N otwithstanding these things, it is sad that works’ performance life ends needlessly, prematurely. Sad when all that is left of them is a recording or two, and no one will ever again hear them performed ‘live’, interpreted by different performers and realized in different settings than the ones on the recordings. Sad unless the expressive intent is to make an object-lesson of senseless carnage, waste, loss.

S orry, but a major facet of the hideous perishability of present-day computer music has to do with the fact that most musicians and composers do not have—nor do they have much desire to acquire—adequate expertise in engineering and fluency in refactoring code. On the one hand they will spend decades mastering multiple instruments and acquiring skill in orchestration, but on the other hand they will not spend a moment acquiring or maintaining skills in engineering that are needed to support preserving their achievements as computer musicians and composers. Boggles my mind.

S o what kinds of software tools and environments, if any, might be adequate for composer/users who lack technical knowledge in programming and software engineering, to enable their works to be performable ‘live’ 20 or more years from now, on different hardware and software than they were composed on? Or, given that computer and electroacoustic compositions involve multiple, complex, heterogeneous embedded (pervasive, ubiquitous) and parallel computing systems, is it even realistic to think that a ready-made end-user integrated development environment (IDE) is even feasible to create—one that would effectively immunize such musicians and their compositions against the ravages of time and technology obsolescence?

M y answer, as one who has lived for 25+ years as a professional software developer in a U.S. health informatics firm whose current-generation of applications comprise more than 37 million lines of sourcecode, is “I do not think so.” I do not think that any tool can comprehensively automate the porting and refactoring, now or ever.

I nstead, I believe that composers who want their works to remain performed and performable will either (a) have to acquire some skills of a code-refactoring engineer and suck it up and spend a modest part of their creative hours doing actual refactoring work, or (b) outsource those refactoring tasks to service contractors who do have those skills.

I n the (b) case, the composer needs to be knowledgeable enough about refactoring to be able to perform quality-assurance checks, to see that the contractor has done the job right, and to be sure that the new version does accurately reproduce the aesthetic choices of the original. Regression testing!

T he “Oh, yes, it [obsolescence, no refactoring, perishing] is wonderful!” quip on the iIRCAM twitter feed (jpeg above) [backhandedly?] feeds a kind of ego-centrism and sensation-mongering. I would love to think it’s harmless snark, a carefree “Here today, gone tomorrow, fine by me!” answer. Probably, that’s all that it is.

B ut the reality is, there’s a lot of remarkable, beautiful music—the result of countless hours of effort and musicianly skill—that today is being allowed to go headlong toward oblivion, all because nobody cares enough to engineer it in such a way as to prevent that. The book links below provide some useful sources that can guide you—that can enable you to learn how to do refactoring of your own compositions to future performance platforms, or to hire somebody else to do this.

Y es, some composers, by their own choosing, will simply decline to preserve their work, or preserve it only temporarily. Sort of like Damian Hirst and his infamous shark in formaldehyde or rotting copulating cow and bull. “Posterity? Not my problem! I won’t be alive then!” That’s fine. Being a Damian Hirst is not a disgrace. Transience is even an enviable fate. I like the idea of cremation, for example. I understand the wish to become atoms, dust.

B ut if you don’t mean to be a Damian Hirst, though, then implementing your version-to-version ‘uplifts’ changes without having to manually rewrite each and every data structure and interface design requires support by another goal: Clean separation and ‘pluggable’ pattern-based interfacing. If one has a synthesis algorithm that plays a particular soundfile or patch in a certain way and with certain timing and through certain channels, then a refactoring should allow that soundfile or patch to be accurately and consistently rendered in the new configuration, through the same or equivalent channels and with the same or indistinguishably different timing and processing, without having to manually reverse-engineer and manually specify each and every detail on the new config.

A ll of this requires an ontology for mapping synonymy of synths and waveform samples and libraries and channels/layers (and modules fan-ins and fan-outs topology, and inter-platform clock timedivision-resultion, and inter-platform sampling-freq and bit-depth skew, and EQ and reverb and other processing idioms, frequencies and pitch-bends, vocoder and compander FX, attack/decay envelopes, and timing, etc.) on different configs…

M ight be done in OWL/RDF or other environments, but such ontology does not yet exist so far as I am aware. Current-generation mapping paradigms range from 2D graphical ‘wire-patching’ of Max/MSP and Pd, to primitive source-code ‘text-based patching’ as in SuperCollider or ChucK, to WorldofWarcraft (and others’) OpenGLES patching of urMus elements, to Marsyas’s Qt4-based patching.

A s things are right now, you do in-line modding of your sourcecode, encapsulating the syntactic result of your work, but not the behaviors of your work. By contrast, true refactorings capture the behaviors and port those behaviors correctly to the new platform(s), not just the syntactic synonymy.

M any refactors that I do in Java/Eclipse are manual, really tedious. There is a refactor to convert an anonymous datatype to nested, and then nested to top-level, but there is nothing to convert a top-level type to anonymous (or nested). Lots of cut-and-paste required. Ultimately, you write your own source-modifying refactors. Chaining other refactors together into a script is only a start.

T ake Max/MSP, for example. Max is a data-flow procedural programming language in which programs are called “patches” and constructed by connecting “objects” within a “patcher”, the 2D Max/MSP GUI IDE. These objects are dynamically-linked libraries, each of which may receive input (through one or more “inlets”), generate output (through “outlets”), or both. Objects pass messages from their outlets to the inlets of connected objects.

M ax/MSP supports six basic atomic data types that can be transmitted as messages from object to object: int, float, list, symbol, bang, and signal (for MSP audio connections). A number of more complex data structures exist within the program for handling numeric arrays (table data), hash tables (coll data), and XML information (pattr data). An MSP data structure (buffer~) can hold digital audio information within main memory. In addition, the Jitter package adds a scalable, multi-dimensional data structure for handling large sets of numbers for storing video and other datasets (matrix data). Max/MSP is object-oriented and involves libraries of objects that are linked and scheduled and dispatched by a patcher executive. Most objects are non-graphical, consisting only of an object’s name and a number of arguments/attributes (in essence class properties) typed into an object box. Other objects are graphical, including sliders, number boxes, dials, table editors, pull-down menus, buttons, and other objects for running the program interactively. Max/MSP/Jitter comes with hundreds of these objects in the standard package; extensions to the program are written by composers and third-party developers as Max patchers (e.g., by encapsulating some of the functionality of a patcher into a sub-program that is itself a Max patch) or as objects written in C, C++, Java, or JavaScript. And those, too, require refactoring from time to time, just like your compositions do.

Refactored DSP Pd-Max/MSP code, PullUpMembers

R efactoring can change program behavior. For example, a ‘PullUpMembers’ refactoring changes this Max DSP method that previously was encapsulated in and extends a class ... pulls it up into the class that was previously its parent: that is the example that the A-to-B refactoring above illustrates.

B ut PullUpMembers refactoring causes concurrency bugs when it mishandles the ‘synchronized’ method. When that happens, methods in the parent and child can be time-interleaved in arbitrary ways by the operating system, different from what was the case in the original composition. It messes up the sound. You don’t want that. You need to take special engineerly steps to prevent it. You can’t just ‘plug-and-play’.

M oveMethod refactor methods can cause deadlock and starvation, with mutex and lock conflicts. Other refactoring can give rise to other sorts of bugs. The up-shots of this are that (a) creating an automated-unsupervised refactoring engine for any of the current-generation computer composition IDEs and the scripts/patches they emit would be incredibly difficult and nobody has yet done it [because there’s not enough money in it to make a viable business-case], and (b) doing it auto/semi-supervised or, worse, manually is a tough slog, mitigated only by some considerable skill and fluency in the tools and coding, hence, my remark above that it ain’t gonna happen unless you become a decent engineer as well as musician.

A ny program feature without an automated test simply doesn’t exist.”
— Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, p. 57.

T he video game Half-Life 2 (HL2) uses realtime sound event calls to Pd as its sound OS. Game events are sent from HL2 to the Open Sound Control (OSC) engine, which triggers the sound by Pd via the network. Pd has the sample data and the specified sound-behaviors in-memory and can be instructed to modify those in realtime (perhaps by other game events and other processing of those) without recompiling. WorldofWarcraft uses Lua and Max/MSP.

T hink about it: if composers who are writing and maintaining video game scores across multiple years’ releases and across various gaming platforms do refactorings of their compositions out of economic necessity, why not you? Is your music any less deserving of future live performances than video game music?

W ould IRCAM or conservatories with computer music curricula please add some courseware by engineers who are knowledgeable about refactoring? Save the Music!

T he secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources [and efficiently refactor them in perpetuum].”
— Albert Einstein, amateur violinist.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Stochastic Incipits & Continuants: Sonic Ontology in Epstein’s ‘Bloom’

B loom’ is about Time or, rather, the suspension of our conventional sense of musical Time… The solo English horn plays bass notes from which chords bloom and rise up through the ensemble. ‘Bloom’ is a series of short sections, each of which is characterized by a specific texture. The English horn is either the prominent solo voice in the texture, or it becomes the lead voice in shaping the sound of the ensemble… ‘Bloom’ ends with a giant canonic chorale, which gradually reduces texturally until all that’s left are the double-reed instruments. This gradually thins out until the last thing we hear is the solo English horn—an ending that reminds us of—but isn’t exactly like—the opening.”
— Marti Epstein, program notes.

E ven the sound of the word ‘Bloom’ is evocative—there’s an onomatopoietic rightness to it that we eagerly concur with after, say, only a minute or two into the piece. The world premiere of this composition by Marti Epstein for English horn and wind ensemble was performed by the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble on Tuesday evening this week, in the small recital hall of Boston Conservatory at 31 Hemenway, with Eric Hewitt conducting.

R obert Sheena, principal English horn with the BSO, was the featured soloist. Besides his BSO duties, Sheena is presently on-faculty with the Boston Conservatory, Boston University, New England Conservatory, and the Longy School of Music.

S heena’s treatment of the blossoming, organic phrases in ‘Bloom’ was expansive yet terse. In a work that is permissive of prolixity by the soloist, Sheena’s phrasing and dynamics were elegant, suggestive more than demonstrative—economical. The polyphonic ‘builds’ that Epstein refers to in her program notes—swelling and shrinking, ebbing and flowing—are a novel kind of canonical pattern. Rather than canonical forms that have more or less crisp, decidable beginnings and endings or cyclical structure, the canonical ‘builds’ in ‘Bloom’ involve non-deterministic propagation of musical thoughts or concepts between the soloist and the various sections in the ensemble.

T ime-lapse photography/cinematography of a bed of flowers opening and closing may have been the nominal motivation that inspired Epstein to compose this piece, but the physical and logical correspondences/parallels do not stop there. For example, there are gene-expression and receptor-signalling processes in biology that have closely analogous spatial features and time-oriented kinetics. So, as I sat enthralled with the performance last night I began to think, not so much about the provenance of the imagery that Epstein gave us, but thought instead of meta-concepts—how this piece is constructed, why these waves of sound propagating from section to section work the magic that they do [on us humans? on birds, dogs, whales, cicadas and other musical species?], and the ontology of the concepts underlying the musical structure and processes of ‘Bloom’.

T he English horn, of course, is fundamental to this ontology or world-view. Yes, Sheena’s realization of the part is economical, eschewing anything more than the minimum necessary, never to ‘comment’ on anything (any concept implied by the score) that should be self-evident or obvious to any thinking performer/listener. His refraining from dilatory interpretations makes Time itself more precious—a feature that is consistent with Epstein’s reverence for Sibelius ... Time made to stand still, Time stilled by Music.

B ut my saying this may seem to give too much emphasis to Sheena’s particular choices or Hewitt’s conducting or other performance details. Rather, the preciousness of Time inheres in the composition that Epstein has devised, and in her choice of English horn for the main character/protagonist.

W hat I mean is, not all instruments’ characters are created ‘equal’. The English horn’s distinctive timbre is a lucky endowment—it has an architecture (and a high double-reed back-pressure) that enables it to be ‘terser’ than most instruments are disposed to be.

A writer [musician] is someone for whom writing [musicking] is more difficult [risky; momentous; tight-rope-like] than for other people.”
— Thomas Mann.

T he ebbing and flowing of the canonical structures—the contagious crescendos and decrescendos among the sections—reminded me of the aurora borealis… its dancing, shimmering colored curtains of light in the northern night sky… Reminded me, too, of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction or other autopoietic/morphogenetic integro-differential Reaction-Diffusion equations in chemistry... Or, if Time is standing still, then maybe it’s like the birth of a nebula—something celestial, galactic. Yes, ‘Bloom’ seemed to me more celestial than botanical…

T he stochastic (non-deterministic) quality of the incipits’ beginnings and the stochastic dynamics of their propagating to other regions of the ensemble as they play—the uncertainty of the stochastics decreases our attending to the incipits themselves and increases our attention to what I would call ‘continuants’. ‘Continuant’ is a fancy term used in philosophy of language and in informatics, but it really signifies something pretty commonsensical: a sub-class or descendant of a higher-level (and prior/earlier) concept or utterance. Continuants inherit most of the attributes (morphology, behaviors, capabilities, tendencies, processes, etc.) of their higher-level precursor incipits [of which the English horn part is emblematic in ‘Bloom’], but they have autonomy of their own and are influenced by their own contexts and histories.

T here are links at the bottom of this CMT post on informatics ontology engineering, for you composers who want to see whether ontology architecture may have something to offer you as a compositional framework. Your intentions and results may be quite different form Epstein’s, of course. But the ontology engineering framework and methods might well be amenable to your aims, or might at least offer you some innovative inspiration...

T he ‘Basic Formal Ontology’ (BFO) in informatics theory consists in a series of sub-ontologies at different levels of granularity. The ontologies are divided into two varieties: SNAP (‘snapshot’) ontologies, comprehending continuant entities such as three-dimensional enduring objects, and SPAN ontologies, comprehending processes conceived as extended through, enduring, and spanning time. BFO incorporates both three-dimensionalist and four-dimensionalist perspectives on reality within a single framework. Interrelations are defined between the two types of ontologies in a way which gives BFO the facility to deal with both static/spatial and dynamic/temporal features of reality. Each SNAP ontology is an inventory of all entities existing at a time. Each SPAN ontology is an inventory of all the processes unfolding through a given interval of time. Both types of ontology serve as basis for a series of sub-ontologies, each of which can be conceived as a window on a certain portion of reality at a given level of granularity.”

I n summary, one of the most novel and beautiful aspects of ‘Bloom’, to me, upon hearing this premiere performance, was these cascades of continuants—the waves upon waves of consequents: more and more [temporally- and spatially-disperse logical ——] consequents, piling up and washing over the antecedents/incipits laid down by Sheena’s English horn. The more loquacious instruments inject their colors/flavors—they could not do otherwise, any more than Sheena could prevent the English horn from being its terse self. And the organism, or flower bed, or aquatic algae bloom, or transcriptome, or receptor-signalling network, or galaxy, or whatever it is—is big enough and generous/tolerant enough to accommodate all of it. Heartwarmingly, beautifully so.

W e listened to Epstein’s new nebula blooming with an IMAX-type wonderment—floored by discovering a wideness of musical ‘peripheral vision’ that we didn’t previously know we had, awed by a deep-space ontology we hadn’t known was there. And then we stepped out of the recital hall and into the warm, starry Boston springtime night…

M arti Epstein has completed commissions for the Munich Bienniale, the CORE Ensemble, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, the Foxborough Music Association, the Fromm Foundation, and Guerilla Opera, among others. She has been a fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center and a composer in residence at the MacDowell Colony. She is Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music and at the Boston Conservatory.

Tarantula Nebula, blooming; photo © NASA

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Marc Satterwhite: On Absolute Becoming and Quantum Passage

N ec est tamen, quod putes illos ignorare, quam cara res sit Tempus.
Vite solatium: iniqui temporis oblivio.

Do not believe that people are unaware how precious Time is;
Consolation of my life: the obliviousness of Unjust Time.”
— Petrarch, letter to Francesco Nello, 1353.

L a vita fugge, e non s’arresta una ora;
e la morte vien dietro a gran giornate—
le cose presenti e le passate
mi danno guerra, e le future ancora.

Life flees and never rests one moment,
and death runs after it with mighty stride;
Present preoccupations and memories from the past
and things from the future, too, wage war on me.”
— Petrarch, Sonnet 272.

I know that this Marc Satterwhite composition references the famous Flor Garduño photos of the same title. But it troubles me that our sense of the word ‘witness’ is, in English, so passive and bystanderly. To see the score for this mystical cello piece or, better, to hear Paul York perform it, is to think of the word ‘witness’ in its sense as a verb … ‘witnessing’ as a way of actively, interventionally making something happen. Or, alternatively, actively forestalling it or keeping it at bay, containing it.

I do not think that I oversimplify if I say that much of Marc’s music grows out of traumatic experience, his understanding and integration of his emotional response to that experience and the humanity and deep spiritual nature of that response which is so perfectly expressed in his music. Many of these experiences involve loss; personal or shared. That certainly is reflected in the chamber works recorded here. ‘Epitafio’ is an achingly beautiful testament to the deep sadness that Marc felt for the deaths of the parents of a high school friend who were early mentors of his musical talents. ‘Witnesses of Time’ reflect in their starkness, dignity and unexpected joy the pain and delight he found in equal measure during the six years he lived in Latin America. Here snatches of indigenous melodies and rhythms are filtered though a modern sensitivity and given great emotional depth. ‘Memento Mori I’ reflects both of the types of loss mentioned. It manifests the powerful emotional reaction that Marc had to an interactive art exhibit of that name, commemorating the artist’s lost friends and loved ones and the sympathetic reaction it caused to his own continuing pain at the loss of his mother to suicide ten years before.”
— Ronald Grames.

T his is, in a very real way, a Satterwhite essay on the plasticity of time, on plurality of ‘worlds’, and on the possibility of ‘quantum personhood’ and ‘trans-world individuals’. The inspirations for what he has written here—and the superb renderering that Paul York gives the piece in performance—are dark.

T he exotic cello techniques constitute a gallery of ‘modal realism’—in the way that philosophers of language and mind use that phrase… ‘modal’, as in past-present-future modes.

T he limitations of our sense of time are extreme. The smallest interval that is perceptible to us is about 20 milliseconds, and the longest period is limited to a human lifetime, about 100 years. In nature, we know that the range is many orders of magnitude larger, both shorter and longer—from events at the atomic attosecond (10^-18 sec) scale: the time it takes for light to travel the length of three hydrogen atoms; the time it takes for an atomic nucleus to recoil… to billions of years for the age of the Universe. But Nature and evolution did not equip us with senses or memory suitable to be aware of those timescales.

P etrarch regretted every one of his wasted moments. Witnessing time’s passage is always poignant; our own certain mortality and finiteness haunt us. This is not the End, but we can sort of see It from here.

T he speed and irreversibility of Time’s slipping away is inherent in the human condition, the cause for the poignancy. But Petrarch is all about himself, and about financial metaphors—‘rarity-value’ correlations, pearls vs. balsam—as though Time were an exchange-economy. As if. Petrarch commodifies Time and thinks of it as linear only, and those are bad moves, philosophically. There are many possibilities, including the possibility of branching space-time (see the cool little book by Le Poidevin, p. 191ff).

B ut Time has more fugacity [fleeingness] than any other substance ... its fugacity is infinite, unlike other physical things, solutes dissolving. So, following Petrarch’s implication, infinite fleeingness should entail infinite value, pricelessness?

F ew writers (Seneca; Husserl; Heidegger; Ricoeur; Adorno; a few others) have been as aware as Petrarch that time is inherent in poetry and music. Sonic art unfolds in duration; and the work once written bears and maintains an intimate relationship between the Past and the Future, dependent upon our gray-matter CPUs with their sub-MHz clocks and supra-attosecond/sub-century memories.

T he present address instantly becomes past, and the ego-tu in Satterwhite’s text/score addresses indefinite future audiences, as well as our future selves. Satterwhite’s causality is authorial, essayistic—where ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’ is not a logical fallacy but is instead Ultimate Truth.

S atterwhite [and ‘Witnesses’] refutes the Petrarchian idea that Time is linear and commodified. The cello engages in [quantum] communication with past and future events—sometimes on timescales within a bow-stroke or thumb-slap, sometimes on timescales very much longer. With such features, this clearly is not music to listen to at a great distance; indeed, it is a meditation that is best apprehended by the player himself/herself or by a friend sitting nearby. If live performance at close range is not an option, then this CD is a fine substitute, headphones on, suitably cranked up.

H inc sepe contingit, ut laudes eorum hominum, qui nobiscum vixerunt ignorantes, mira res dictu vetustissimorum certam notitiam habeamus. [It often happens that, while we are unaware of the praiseworthiness of people who are alive when we are, we amazingly have reliable knowledge of people from long ago.]

Witnesses of Time (Four studies on photographs by Flor Garduño)

Wounded Angel (San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Guatemala)
Tarahumara Pilgrimage (Norogáchic, México)
Threshold of Incense (Chichicastenango, Guatemala)
Tornado (Lake Titicaca, Bolivia)

T hese four movements were inspired by and named after photographs by Flor Garduño. Although Garduño’s work covers many themes, she is best known for her black-and-white documentaries of Latin American life, landscapes, and the human figure.

W ounded Angel’ depicts a Guatemalan Mayan Indian, holding a forlorn wooden statue of an angel sans right wing. The rhythmic structure of this movement—‘sees’ and then ‘raises’ the wager—the one that Flor had made with her photo—to the effect that even sacred icons are frail and require care and repair. Festinating ‘fits’ and ‘starts’ augment our sense of age, decrepitude, and alienation. The pensive mood of York’s cello weighs heavily on us.

T he ‘Tarahumara Pilgrimage’ photo shows a group dressed in their traditional paraphernalia, undertaking a procession that’s paradoxically, astonishingly, simultaneously transcendent and concrete. Some of the people carry drums, embodied in the percussive elements in this movement of the ‘Witnesses’ composition. There are violent pizzicati and sepulchral knocks on the cello belly and shoulder, but these do not draw attention to the performer or the composer; instead, they elegantly serve Satterwhite’s expressive purpose. Crucified cello is home inside but won’t come to the door just now. Strings damped, any sound played ‘short’ enough will be perceived as having no pitch—only the noise spectra of the attacks will be heard. Flesh, thumb-slaps, fingernail taps/trills, bowstick rattle against tender wood—the noises [confer humanity upon—/admonish us to regard the spirit of—] the box of the instrument—the wood itself—and reveal how unfair/pedestrian is our focus only on [transcendental] string-against-bowhair. The earthy box has its own dignity, without which cello pilgrimage would be impossible.

T hreshold of Incense’ is Garduño’s photo taken at the entry to the Santo Tomás Church in Chichicastenango, a culturally important Indian village in the Guatemalan high country. The scene shows smoke of incense mingling with morning fog, to the point where what is interpenetrating what is unclear. The breathy passages evoke meditation on the tenuousness of life; harp-like arpeggios explore an amazing scope of the cello’s colors. The instrument is unrepentant—defiant in its upper register. Listen, half-way expecting it to be apocalyptic: a cello [who] is, when played exactly in this way, Jacob’s Ladder. We perceive Satterwhite’s argument about ‘witness’, the verb, and about active, willful, quantum intervention to change the fabric of Time.

Paul York, near top of Jacob's Ladder, with cello; 12th-Century icon, St. Cahterine's Monastery, Sinai

T ornado’ captures a waterspout menacing Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, signifying nothing? Well, no. No more and no less, I suppose, than Corryvreckan signifies. Elaborating a series of unsettling, incongruous possible significands that are irresolvable, underdetermined. Existential chasm, transient, gaping, capricious, beautiful, fearsome. Musical aporia. There comes a moment when active quantum ‘witnessing’ and ‘becoming’ are done. At the end, we accept what is, utterly without recourse. We take our last breath. No more ‘becoming’. Laters.

W itnesses of Time’ was commissioned by and dedicated to Marc’s colleague at the University of Louisville School of Music, cellist Paul York, who premiered the work in 2004.

[50-sec clip, Marc Satterwhite, Witnesses of Time, ‘Wounded Angel’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Marc Satterwhite, Witnesses of Time, ‘Tarahumara Pilgrimage’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Marc Satterwhite, Witnesses of Time, ‘Threshold of Incense’, 1.6MB MP3]

A mong the groups that have performed and recorded Marc’s works are the Boston Symphony, the Utah Symphony, the Louisville Orchestra, Verdehr Trio, eighth blackbird, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Core Ensemble, Tales & Scales, the Chicago Chamber Musicians, London Composers’ Ensemble, and Percussion Group Falsa. Marc has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. A graduate of Michigan State University and Indiana University, he has taught in Texas, Indiana and Michigan and is Professor of Composition and Music Theory the University of Louisville School of Music where, in addition to teaching, he directs the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

T his Centaur disc has much to admire on it; sorry to abbreviate my comments just to the eponymous ‘Witnesses’ cello solo.