Katherine Balch

New Geometry takes its title from a scene in Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia. In this scene, young Thomasina Coverly discovers a recursive function that allows her graph the intimate design of an apple leaf, which she calls “New Geometry of Irregular Forms.” Thomasina’s math allows her to zoom into the miniscule veins and fine details of a shape that appears very simple to the naked eye. In my piece, I play with the opposite process: zooming out from compact gestures through the harmonic trajectory of the piece, which passes from microtonal to chromatic to diatonic landscapes. But this exploration is not as bound to a strict process as Thomasina’s math. As another character remarks, “real data is messy”, and in the search for mathematical truth, “it’s all very noisy out there, very hard to spot the tune…the unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.” This piece was premiered by Ensemble Intercontemporain on 27 June 2015 at Centquarte, Paris, France as an octet, and later revised for 13 players for Contemporaneous.

– Katherine Balch