Scratch

Project Notes

This scratch project was used, less than an hour after its completion, in perhaps the world's first live performance of improvised music conducted by a scratch project.

We played a short set of several three minute "pieces," played by different groupings of a pianist, drummer, saxophonist, clarinetist, and trombonist (me).

I pressed the start button at the beginning of each piece, and we would wait for the first vertical line to cross "now." At that moment, everyone would start improvising a repeating pattern, melody, texture, silence, sound, or whatever, trying to listen and lock in with each other. When the next vertical line reached the "now," we had to suddenly change to playing something different. The dotted lines mean an optional change. The amounts of time between each line's arrival are randomly chosen from a list of fibonacci numbers. After 3 minutes, "the end" arrived.