PROGRAM NOTES

“Euler’s Music” is a work deeply indebted to Euler’s Disk (a scientific educational toy first developed by Leonhard Euler to illustrate the motion of spinning disk on a flat surface), coupled with my own curiosity of the mechanics of gyroscopes born during my undergraduate studies in mechanical engineering. Given an impulse of energy, the disk spins, the axis of rotation continually shifts, and the disk gradually loses energy. What is interesting and grounds for musical exploration is the interplay of energy within the rotations of the disk. As rotation in one direction slows, rotation in another direction accelerates, and despite losing energy, the motion of the disk increases exponentially before imploding dramatically to a sudden halt.

I define the disk’s three axes of rotation (X, Y, Z) as three distinct pitch sets created from the division of the chromatic scale ( C, Db, Ab, Eb | D, F#, A#, B | E F G A). Each of these sets can be heard interacting, competing and eventually melding as they react to the initial impulse of energy. Euler’s Music utilises the serialisation of pitch sets, polyrhythms, dynamics and register (albeit with varying degrees of flexibility), using the exploration of the laws of physical motion that govern the mechanical phenomena of Euler’s Disk as a means to achieve musical structure. Is this logic transmutable, and if so, could physical mechanics be a new source of musical structure?