Release of « Metamodels in Compositional Practices » by José-Luis Besada

Many composers seem to find inspiration in science, although this fact is not standardized. Indeed, composer’s musical practices are far from being homogeneous nowadays, and science has achieved an extreme degree of diversification, leading to a complex junction where both situations converge. This picture show an impossible normalization spanning a wide range of factual compositional practices. Nevertheless, the common denominator to their scientific inspiration deserves musicological attention. We shall state, as a research hypothesis, that in spite of their obvious diversity a minimum of situations or stages stand out among creative processes shared by musicians who borrow scientific models when they composer. This hypothesis directly entails two research questions :

What minimal cognitive dispositions and formal implications might take part in any transferring from a scientific model to a musical one during composer’s creative practices ?

What methodological and analytical stands should musicologists take in order to efficiently address the study of musical works originating from those practices ?

This book is aimed at providing some clues as to both questions. Its first part combines arguments from logics and cognitive linguistics, leading to the definition of a ‘compositional metamodel’. It also provides a possible framework for analyzing science-inspired compositions. The second part of the book delimits Alberto Posadas’s creative practices, focusing on his fractal metamodels-based on fractional Brownian motions, the Mandelbrost set, Lindenmayer systems and histologic fractals – for composing Liturgia Fractal

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Metamodels in Compositional Practices, The case of Alberto Posadas's Liturgia Fractal by José-Luis Besada
IRCAM-Centre Pompidou / Delatour France Editors