The Three Ecologies (2020)
for oboe, bassoon, horn, and electronics – dur. 6’40″
Figure 1. The multistructural preconditions in the music ‘The Three Ecologies’, analogous to the hyperbody and to Guattari’s three ecologies.
The diagram in Figure 1. represents three probabilistic ‘clouds’ of musical-gestural parts, in the work The Three Ecologies. Together they form a multistructural representation of a perceived whole. Drawing on the mathematical field of graph theory, the composition uses a graph-based approach as a precondition to the score, known as k-core percolation. Described as an ‘architecture of uncorrelated complex networks with arbitrary degree distributions as a set of successively enclosed substructures’ (Dorogovtsev, Goltsev, & Mendes, 2006). I designed the graph myself with linkages, k-core groupings, and probability data that are part of three transitional probability matrices. The colours represent one journey through the graph for each of the three instruments: oboe, bassoon, and horn (the three ecologies). The graph alludes to Félix Guattari’s notion of the three ecologies in his book of the same name (Guattari, 2008 [1989]), which are: the environment, the social, and human subjectivity. It also reflects the hyperbody notion, as the graph portrays dynamic aspects of perceptual entities with flexible interchangeable nodes, cores, parts, and groupings.
References
Dorogovtsev, Sergey, Goltsev, Alexander Viktotorovich, and Mendes, José Fernando. “k-Core architecture and k-core percolation on complex networks”. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 224(1-2), 2006, 7-19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.
Guattari, Felix. 2008 [1989]. The Three Ecologies. Continuum. London.
Bassoon part
Oboe part
Horn part
Electronic part
Recommended to be played through headphones.