Music Eterna

Hi guys, I am writing to you from sunny Los Angeles the weather today is blue skies, cool breeze at 82F.  Recently my good friend Andre Goncalves in Lisbon has completed an APP that will play a composition and it will never be repeated and played the same way twice, onto eternity.  I was really proud to play an assistant role in this project.  Below is a more detailed description by Andre, and the links to the App.

Maybe the new format of music making/listening is finally here.

-Alex Zhang Hungtai, April 2015


Musica Eterna
The music about to be experienced in this App is being released in the tradition of a musical Album, my first solo record since 2005. Over these last 10 years i’ve went through several iterations in my approach to music this release comes to close the circle on the way i came to think about composing music.

In todays age and for my musical work in particular i find it castrating to continue the tradition of fixing music to a timeline, releasing it in a fixed medium, in the form of fixed compositions of a fixed length . There was a time where the technologies were not available to make it in any way different, in this sense even contemporary music thought of in non-fixed terms incorporating chance in their scores would always be delivered to the public in the form of a recording not allowing these intrinsic properties of the music to naturally change at different listenings as if they would if performed live. This, i always thought, was a major issue with releasing such music, as it betrays the initial composers idea.

Today the tools are here to allow composers to present and deliver music without these constrains, it’s now common that wireless equipped portable devices, as following the Walkman tradition, allow us to carry "all” world’s music everywhere we go. The computational potential of such devices is what allows me to deliver this music to you in such a new form. This music will not repeat itself, ever.

It’s my pleasure to welcome you to Musica Eterna.

André Gonçalves, March 2015




The Composition:The full Musica Eterna piece is about 4h.
The App is the indefatigable piece interpreter, playing it repeatedly related to the current date and time.
The composition features a total of about 250 “patterns” and contains rules to play these through about 25 “ambients”. These rules incorporate chance operations which allow it to be different every time the piece is played, as it would if performed live.
 
The webpage link:
http://andregoncalves.info/musicaeterna/

The App Store link:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/musica-eterna/id978745994?ls=1&mt=8