4:1 and 3:2

 I was sitting and reading in my backyard last summer and happened to look up and see, through the window in my wife's office, a ceiling fan.  Earlier in the year, one of the fan blades had broken off in rather dramatic fashion -- fortunately no one was hurt -- and so the fan had hung motionless since, awaiting a replacement wing.  That afternoon, though, I saw it wheeling about at low speed, surprisingly wobblelessly; being a moderately warm day and my wife being a lover of fresh air, the windows were open and so she had decided to risk the fan's aid in keeping the breeze flowing through her space.  After I got over my initial uneasiness from seeing an unbalanced fan running, I noticed that the blades cut across my view through the window with an interestingly odd meter:  1-2-3-4-()-1-2-3-4-()-1-2-3-4-(), etc.  Even on low speed, the tempo set by this aeolian zeotrope was fairly high and, getting out my favorite metronome app, I timed it at about 178 bpm.  Tapped out by hand, this created a compelling beat and I went right up to my studio and began composing what ultimately became this:  

I love 5/4 meter generally and usually divide it fairly conventionally, 3:2 or 2:3 (sometimes alternating between both, creating a 10/4 or10/8 of 3:2:2:3), but here the 4:1 division set up a whole new way of participating in it, so that's how I began this piece.  You'll notice, though, that, while the percussion hammers at the 4:1, the melodic instruments don't follow that division especially closely.  Indeed, the opening theme(s) could be argued to be polymetric, with a 2:2 4/4 against the 4:1 5/4, but, in the end, I modified the melodic dynamics to accentuate the 4:1, finding that adding a polymeter to the system ended up being more confusing than interesting.  About a third of the way through, the theme changes to a more straight-ahead 3:2 divided 5/4; it seems I can't get away from that wobbly waltz -- and maybe I don't want to -- but the piece returns to the original 4:1 at the end.    

Coming in the wake of other recent forays into quasi-chamber/orchestral-sample-based music, the sounds that came to mind out of the 4:1 beat were of the same ilk, so I went with that.  My last semester of music school I performed as part of a quartet for flute, viola, 'cello, and vibraphone and that formative experience, along with my abiding passion for Debussy's third Sonata for Diverse Instruments, often leads me to set viola among similar fellows and this piece is very much a result of that bias.  

As I got closer to sensing an ending for the piece and started attending more to its mood and expression, I grew more aware of its musical stiffness, a nearly universal problem for computer music.  The piece then became an opportunity for me to explore just how expressive -- primarily dynamically -- I could get my software could be.  I learned quite a bit on that sojourn and distinguished aspects that I had some control over -- mainly velocity and those components of a sample that could be modulated by it -- and those that I didn't, especially the quality of the sample.  So, the success of this experiment in expression is a function of my ongoing lessons in computer-performed music and the limits of the samples that I can currently afford to buy.  Overall, it seems workable enough to me, although I would very much like to have better samples, particularly of the viola (🤑).  

Technically, there is little to describe here:  this was created in Ableton Live 10 using the native Orchestral Strings, Woodwinds, and Mallets sample banks and the native Grand Piano sample bank.  The drum kit was partly a native Live sample bank plus some brush samples I ripped from YouTube.  I then added just enough Valhalla VintageVerb to sound as realistically like a recital hall as I could discern.