Diverge, converge, diverge, converge

Soon after I became a composer, Marc Weidenbaum made me a meta-composer. Which I guess makes him a meta-meta-composer? A hyperproducer? There isn’t a word for what Marc is, aside from “awesome.” The most concise way I can think of to describe what he does: he writes reviews of music that doesn’t exist yet and then gets internet strangers to make it. Each track on this playlist is a reading of my score called “Divergence/Convergence,” and each one is quite different from the next.

Here’s Marc’s version of the narrative behind all this music. In a nutshell: I was asked to write a score for the NYU Laptop Orchestra. They performed it. I got a recording of the performance and remixed it. Marc assigned the members of the Disquiet Junto to “perform” the score solo. I got to have the strange and delightful experience of hearing all of the diverse music that resulted.

For any one of these tracks: who is the “composer”? Is it the person who produced it? Me? Marc? All of the above? Does the word even mean anything anymore? Out of the thirty-odd hours of electronic music I’ve produced in my life, “Divergence/Convergence” is the only one that originated as a score, and that score has no music notation on it. In the computer, the score, the performance, and the recording are all the same thing. What a world.