Kranz (2005)
Art is all about form. Forms are represented everywhere – in space, on earth, in nature, in society. One has to be able to read and to understand those forms in order to create something new. In my music I like to use ‘found mathematical objects’: simple automatons which build forms over time. When I encountered Aristid Lindenmayer’s ‘L-systems’ some time ago, I became fascinated with these rules to describe plant forms and growth. The organic development and the self-similarity of the plant forms seemed to be perfectly translatable to music. During my research, I even found the following quote: “Organic form itself is found, mathematically speaking, to be a function of time... We might call the form of an organism an event in space-time, and not merely a configuration in space.” That’s how the idea for Kranz was born: a work that uses a simple Lindenmayer axiom, of which I translated the first five recursions (a slowly growing repetitive structure) to a score for piano and string quintet in five parts. Its harmonic density refers to Ergma by Iannis Xenakis; the articulation of the decaying piano chords in the coda is modeled after Stele by György Kurtág. Kranz is dedicated to my dear friend and composer Willem Boogman.