Radiation evolved from 1965 to 1967. It is inspired by the music of my friend and mentor Renato de Grandis, a Venetian composer of opera. The piece owes its title to the idea of using different orchestra groups in varying combinations, with a single point of simultaneity near the end of the piece from which everything radiates. The compositional design, although not literally based on algorithms, is nevertheless of a “top down” kind.
Radiation was premiered in Tanglewood, MA, by Lutz Herbig, and broadcast by Boston Radio in 1967, when I was a Fellow in Composition at the Berkshire Music Center. The recording is that of a performance at North Texas State University, Denton, TX, conductor Thomas Clark, during the 1981 computer music conference.