Fractals

dawe_fractal"The most striking element of Dawe's individual style is the brake-squealing collision of two starkly contrasted influences.  The composer draws upon structural elements of early and Baroque music and then proceeds to rigorously work out his ideas using principles of fractal geometry." 
-Lawrence A. Johnson The Sunday Boston Globe 1/8/2006

 

Rotational Arrays
f1_rotational_arrays
The first fractal application to compositional workings, I initially applied these recursive operations to 12-tone series and serial fragments (Horn Trio 1993), shortly thereafter I started involving these ideas with strands of Renaissance and Baroque music, imbedding these repeating patterns into the very polyphony, rhythms and forms of this early music, culminating with the full-length opera Prometheus (2004).

 

**Caption for this audio**
Cellular Automata
f2_cellular_automata

One of the more pervasive processes pioneered in my work, I’ve focused mostly on growth patterns that are self-replicating, spawning multiple copies of the original material after some number of generations of growth. Piano Concerto (2002) is a large-scale work that engineers Cellular Automata on local, middle-ground, and structural levels drawing its original shapes from the 1610 Vespers of Claudio Monteverdi.
 
Affine Geometry
f3_affine_geometry

Although existing in the domain of Euclidian Geometry, Affine Geometry involves the translation, rotation, and scaling of shapes, constituting the foundational operations of fractal geometry.  Present in such works as Royal Water Music (2007) and Armide (forthcoming), these compositional workings are pervasive in the Clarinet Quintet (2008) and Longo 415 (2009.)
 
Complex Numbers
f4_complex_numbers

The notions of real number and imaginary numbers interacting on the complex plane to me was so suggestive in the morphing of two pre-existing pieces of music.  In Symphony of Imaginary Numbers (1998) the musical domains of Mozart’s Hafner Symphony and Johann Christian Bach’s Symphony (the inspiration on Mozart’s piece) are added, subtracted, divided and multiplied as complex numbers.  From the union of these two works a new piece is created.
Spectrals
f5_spectrals

The sense of deeper and deeper levels resolution resulting from recursions lead me into the very structure of pitch and timbre itself, continuing these fractal dimensional views and manipulation in the realm of pitch overtones.  Present in The Flowering Arts (2005) and Cracked Orlando (2010), it is used throughout L’Dafne (2006.)