Kenneth Maue is a wonderful composer/artist whose work I got to know from the John Lely/James Saunders book Word Events.
Maue’s piece 2^n Durations Music suggests making a series of durations which increase in powers of 2 until a designated maximum. When this is reached, it counts back down (including a repetition of the highest value). These numbers represent the gap in seconds between a sonic event synchronised between all the performers.
I have long wanted to perform this piece and am now preparing for a remote performance with Tom Roseingrave. We will not communicate with one another about our performances other than to set the initial parameters, but need to be sure we are in sync. I decided to write this script which allows you to see the date, time and duration of performances based on a power of 2 and a given starting time.
Maue says of the piece: “I have done this twice. The second time, we did a seven-month version, the longest durations in the middle being about 24 days each. These occurrences have left me with lasting impression, as if those two series of durations consisted of time somehow different from other time in my life. I recall getting together with the other people, in the room where we kept the gong and the official clock, often at odd times of day and night. And I remember how the expanding first sections of the event gave me a deep sense of the whole world expanding, and how the contracting sections gave me a sense of moving inward to a center point. I recall the impression of being inside something like a cathedral of time.”
Our telepathic version seems an appropriate form of communication during the Covid-19 pandemic: yet another way of reframing a social interaction.
Seeing how increasing powers of 2 interact with the passage of time is also surprisingly fascinating and serves as a reminder of the distorting effect of simple ways of notating large numbers.