John Cage's Number Pieces as Stochastic Processes: a Large-Scale Analysis

Alexandre Popoff

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arXiv · 1311.5853

John Cage's Number Pieces as Stochastic Processes: a Large-Scale Analysis

Alexandre Popoff

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Abstract

The Number Pieces are a corpus of works by composer John Cage, which rely on a particular time-structure used for determining the temporal location of sounds, named the "time-bracket". The time-bracket system is an inherently stochastic process, which complicates the analysis of the Number Pieces as it leads to a large number of possibilities in terms of sonic content instead of one particular fixed performance. The purpose of this paper is to propose a statistical approach of the Number Pieces by assimilating them to stochastic processes. Two Number Pieces, "Four" and "Five", are studied here in terms of pitch-class set content: the stochastic processes at hand lead to a collection of random variables indexed over time giving the distribution of the possible pitch-class sets. This approach allows for a static and dynamic analysis of the score encompassing all the possible outcomes during the performance of these works.

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Alexandre Popoff. 2013-11-17. John Cage's Number Pieces as Stochastic Processes: a Large-Scale Analysis. https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5853

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