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Ignore the Smoke Program Notes:



I've had a longtime interest in "hidden messages" that appear in music throughout the ages. As an undergrad, my musicology professor would discuss the appearance of hidden messages in pre-renaissance music and would comment on the fact that very few people were aware of the hidden messages -- and that many of these messages contained inside jokes that only the learned would understand.

As a masters student, my counterpoint teacher showed our class a collection of rounds and canons that looked fairly innocuous and free of any hidden messages UNTIL they were sung. Then words would be audible due to the sequence of syllables.

Also as a masters student, I examined guitar works from the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco that were created using the names of benefactors or commissioners. In Tedesco’s case, he mapped the alphabet onto the range on the guitar (from written E3 to B6) where E3 = A, F3=B, F#3 =C, etc. From there, Castelnuovo-Tedesco mapped names on to a series of pitches and would use those pitches as source material for a work.

For this piece, I have mapped pitches onto the violin in a similar manner to Castelnuovo-Tedesco and additionally have used morse code to map rhythms onto these pitch materials. A hint for the hidden text for this work is posted at the bottom of the page.

Additionally, I would like to thank Elaine Li and Gary Arthur Dent for their profound help in realizing this work. It could not have been done without them and their wonderful sense of humor.



Below is a version with a horrible violin-midi realization.
Below is an earlier draft with real violin, which sounds much better but there were revisions in the violin part,as well as fixed media, after the recording.


Realized in the University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios.

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