KAUFMAN SYMMETRY MUSIC

-A Musical Adventure to Never Never Land-

I recently have become terribly fascinated by how humans perceive, experience, and consequentially act upon, the little-understood phenomenon of dreaming. We are all dreamers, even if few, if any, dreams can be remembered each night. I am one of the lucky ones that can, in extraordinary detail, remember at least two or three dreams I have a night. The abstraction, obscurity, and absurdity held within these dreams have inspired me to pursue a logic-based music system through which I can both document and detail the dream state of the human being.

The title for this new type of music is Kaufman Symmetry Music, partly as a homage to one of the most important performance artists of the 20th century, and partly as an abstract method of describing a similarly abstract concept. At the moment, KSM will contain abstract compositional methods, comprised mainly of color-based artwork and (again) abstract notation mixed with more traditional notation. Very broad and unspecific instructions will be provided to the musicians in the form of formal tempi and notation instructions, but it will be the job of the musician to navigate through each musical abstraction.

Each KSM composition will contain a painting or other form of graphic art at the top to both represent the compositional title and the general theme of the piece. For concerns of simplicity, it is likely that the beginning compositions will be locations of particularly 'dream-like' imaging or content. There may or may not contain a legend outlining any various instructions that the composer feels is necessary to document throughout the piece. The notation itself will contain very sparse musical notation. It will typically start as a single whole note, which ties into a continually more abstract set of notation (meant to simulate the sleep and/or dream cycles). It may or may not contain more than one bar of a 'dream state', in case to simulate dreams held over a period of time (days, weeks, months, years, etc.) or even the common cases of individuals taking naps during the daytime or waking up in the middle of the night and going back to sleep.

The 'continually more abstract' notation will eventually need to be interpreted by the performer, and read at his/her own pacing and choosing. Every musician receives the same sheet music - the variation in the piece comes from how each performer decides to understand the notation presented to them. My hope in composing KSM is to construct a musical environment which could construct a 'greater picture' of a child-like 'dream land' such as that found in the story of Peter Pan. Topographical Improvising, my former topic of interest, was a musical examination of the real world and its scientific environment traits, but KSM will be exploring the ever-infinite possibilities of the creativity of the human mind. KSM compositions will simultaneously be able to represent many different themes, individuals, sleep states, and even time periods all at once, if in the future I attempt to construct possibilities of multiple conductors and/or layers of musicians performing the dream states through different noted and/or real-world contexts.