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The complete works of Anton Webern (Op 1-31)
RE-SERIALIZED

background

In November 1999 I had only just relocated to Berlin Kreuzberg. Serafina Klarwein reached out to me from Paris where she and Daphna Lapidot were preparing an art exhibition of "small things" and asked me if I had anything to contribute to the exhibition. This inspired me to compose a series of "small things." the idea was to compose a series of pieces small enough to fit on a floppy disk so that each floppy disk would have one stand-alone composition, one in a series of many self-similar but unique compositions to be distributed on floppy disk as a medium.

Concept

At the time I was exploring the technique of slicing (pre-existing) audio into very short segments and re-ordering these segments into new patterns. I was also taking the works of the 2nd Viennese School into consideration when coding music software based on number theory. And so it came to be that I arrived at the 20th century composer with the SMALLEST repetoire output. So the concept was to take the ENTIRE repetoire of Anton von Webern and re-serialize with a computer, based on ratios derived from the Fibinocci sequence instead of 12-element sequences of integers between 1-12. Webern composed only 31 works (Op 1 - 31) before being gunned down on the stoop of his own home (in Austria) by an occupying US Soldier in 1945. If one were to play all of Webern's compositions back-to-back, it represents just about 1 hour of music. Additionally, Webern's music had only just recently entered the public domain and I wanted to "Celebrate" this fact

Realization

I was very lucky to be neighbors with friend and colleague Wolfgang von Schweinitz who was VERY helpful to loan me his box set of Boulez conducts Webern (Op 1- 31) on Deutsche Grammophon as well as a turntable to play them on! So the whole process started out by digitizing the LP records to audio files. Once I had the audio files on my hard disk it was time to let my state-of-the-art PowerMac 7600 computer get busy (a PowerPC G3 with 133 MHz). For this task I reached for a trusty piece of software developed by my friend and colleague Akira Rabelais called 'Argeiphontes Lyre'. After a few days of number crunching, I had 31 compositions less than 2 minutes long when disappointment struck: I had overestimated the power of mpeg encoders to shrink audio files. Once compressed, the files were still too big to fit on floppy disks (1.4 MB max). Sadly, I never presented these compositions to Serafina and Daphna for their exhibition, however now they reside here, online for posterity. You can audition each of the 31 tracks individually on this page below, or download them all as a zip archive here: AvW.zip

The Irony of it all

In the last 20 years, audio compression has advanced such that the original 31 compositions COULD each fit on a 1.4 MB floppy disk, but there's no longer much point.