Fluctuations for Flute
1982, 8:00
While not unperformed, the recording of the piece from 1982 is flawed. Fluctuations was commissioned by Choreo Dance Company, Cambridge, MA, for a modern dance solo called Windshadows designed by Peg Brightman. Both dance and music are based on ideas encoded as input to a computer program for composition. The choreography employs Koenig's Project One program, the music, Xenakis' ST-10 program.) The first program made possible a close collaboration between choreographer and solo performer as equal partners, while the second program delivered output defining the syntactic structure of the composition.
Fluctuations was premiered in 1982, during a NEWCOMP (New England Computer Arts Association) concert in Cambridge, MA., and was subsequently presented in Stuttgart, Darmstadt (Germany), Warsaw, Krakow (Poland) and Brno (Czechoslovakia). It is dedicated to the late Kimball Stickney whose programming effort permitted me to use a PDP-version of Xenakis' program, which was possible only at night, during after-work hours.