"No!": A Triflefor piano solo[0:25]This work was inspired by J. H. Conway's cellular automaton game, "Life", specifically by Robert Wainwright's "5-5-5-5-5-5-5", a striking instance of the game illustrated in Martin Gardner's The Colossal Book of Mathematics (Norton, '01) by superimposing (p. 419) the image's initial and final states. From a meager row of dots along a single straight line, the pattern had evolved into a sparsely dotted rectangle of several thousand units, displaying absolute bilateral symmetry along both axes. All told, an image of growth, for a while promising but ultimately broken up and boxed in! I set about to realize the image as music.
A first step was choosing D4 as the center of pitch, thus invoking the keyboard mirror to incarnate, for the player physically, this image's intervallic symmetry. The game's initial configuration - the dot row - would be set to that pitch. A second task, mapping the rest of the position data to corresponding musical parameters (pitchwise the chromatic scale, timewise a unit note value) was straightforward in itself, but left essential formal aspects unspecified. Thirdly, then, for a strict organic pitchwise modelling of the game's subpatterns, I pursued enharmonic respellings, making sure to take opposite tacks where inversion was involved. Fourthly, to provide rhythmic structure (without analogue in the game output) that could make its time-mapped proportions humanly performable, I improvised a scheme of meters paralleling the overall time reflection. Some implied voice divisions and stategic accents finished the job.
This title was my exclamation upon hearing the first draft. As no better name then suggested itself, I settled upon finding a tempo to match.
Re the extreme parenthesized notes in measures 5 & 13: a "page turner", standing at the pianist's back, may play these outside pairs.
This work became a 2nd precursor to my "Patterns from the Game of Life" series.