| David Lang, a co-founder of New York's "Bang on a Can" Music Festival, wrote International Business Machine (1990) for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The work was commissioned to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Tanglewood Music Center. IBM draws on elements of Minimalist, Downtown, and popular music, and the work represents a highly imaginative approach to both musical composition and orchestral texture. Several layers of musical activity operate throughout the composition: these are analogous to the simultaneous processes computers control. The present analysis classifies these layers and discusses the musical characteristics that distinguish and relate them.;Of particular importance are the pitch and rhythmic cycles---both regular and irregular---which Lang uses throughout the work. Similar techniques and patterns are identified in other works by Lang, including The Anvil Chorus (1993) and Thorn (1993). In addition, those concepts from computer science which figure importantly in the musical texture of IBM are discussed. These concepts include: the CPU clock, binary numbers, on/off states, multiprogramming, and interrupt signals. |
