Peter Plessas

Peter Plessas - Works BACK

COMPOSITION

2024

"Les Innumériques" for player piano with optional video projection, 15mins. Video

12. July 2025, Sound and Music Computing Conference - Ligeti Saal, Graz

Music machines, such as the player piano, are akin to electronic music instruments in that they provide their own energy source and are able to reproduce a musical score without a human performer. While Stravinsky embraced the player piano for its ability to deliberately rule out any musical interpretation by performers, many pieces for player piano usually constitute repertoire that would be unplayable by humans. Music machines are available for music composition since centuries and share a bewildering array of topics with computer-based algorithmic composition. I often prefer to compose algorithms instead of writing notes directly because it allows me to compose what would otherwise remain unwritten or unimagined. For "Les Innumériques" I imagined the keys of the piano as beads, as physical objects which are interconnected and will form one large string. Keys would then react to their neighbor's position via elastic links, turning the piano keyboard into a moving physical structure. Upon having created a physical model of the piano keys using the pmpd library for Pure Data, I went on to compose the piece by shaping the parameters of this dynamic system. "Les Innumériques" is inspired by the abstract of the article "Une étude du concept d'Innumérisme" by Jean-Paul Fischer and Camilo Charron in Psychologie Francaise in 2018. Therein, innumeracy describes the absence of numeracy, the ability to use and to reason with numbers and other mathematical concepts. A good level of numeracy is considered the best protection against unemployment, low wages and poor health by the authors, and was declared a "national priority" in France in 2013.

2022

"Red Death" for three DJs. 30mins. Edition Peters. Video excerpt with score

8. October - 13. November 2022, Volkstheather Wien - Volx

A commission by Christine Gaigg/2nd nature for the theatre performance "Rote Sonne". "Red Death" is composed for three DJs, based on vinyl records of "take death!" (2013) by Bernhard Gander. The theatre performance is inspired by the 1970 Rudolf Thome film of the same title.

2020

Queroval "the lettuce lattice". Video
Live performance, approx. 10mins.

25. September 2020, Festival Wiener Rauschen - Aspern Seestadt

Creating digital music instruments for the performance of a certain music piece is like writing parts of the musical score into the instrument. Researchers have refered to this as composed instruments or work-specific instruments. In "the lettuce lattice" I wanted to create a digital instrument that would suffice the simple requirement of being playable without looking at my laptop's screen. Realised in SuperCollider 3 and performed under my nomicker Queroval.

2019

"Affair: Seven plus or minus two" a sound composition in five parts. 12mins. Audio

7-9. November 2019, Tanzquartier Wien - Halle G, Museumsquartier

Composed entirely from audio clips of spoken words, "Seven plus or minus two" is a journey into the transformation of recorded sound and was commissioned by Christine Gaigg/2nd nature for the theatre performance "Affair". The spoken words, which served as the material for this piece, are text excerpts from this performance. While five parts, out of the seven originally written, made it into the final composition. its title is a hommage to the famous publication "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" by George A. Miller in 1956.
In response to the widely-discussed challenges of notating electroacoustic music, a detailed realisation score is available for the fifth part, "Code Adam". Being a descriptive score created after the composition, it permits the full reconstruction of the fifth part from the original source material using the Composer's Desktop Project (CDP) software, thus also serving as prescriptive score.

1. So badly
2. Remember your skin
3. Doppelleben
4. Unberührt
5. Code Adam Score

2006

"links234" for four oscillators and four loudspeakers. Audio
Fixed medium or live performance, 8mins.

4.May 2012, Forum Opus - Le Blancs-Mesnil
2006, Institut für Computermusik und Elektronische Medien ICEM - Folkwang Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Tanz in Essen.
2006, Institut für Komposition und Elektroakustik - Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien.

This composition draws heavily from piece of historic studio equipment, a Moog modular synthesizer hosted at Mills College in Oakland. Explore this amazing instrument, I got inspired from its sequencing module. This module permitted me to adjust the pitches of three oszillators sounding together via rotary dials and step backwards and forwards between several columns of these dials. This invited an intuitive and immediate way to find interesting chords, possibly outside equal temperament, and then switch between these chords, slowly developing a musical form and still being able to fine-tune or radically change the pitches where appropriate. For the final composition I created a likewise four oscillator set-up in the Pure Data langauge, with a score being read in from a text file containing timed parameter values. After having worked with elaborate sound spatialization methods for a while I wanted to revert to a very simple correlation between single musical voices and single physical sound sources. The position and movements of the sound sources perceived by the audience should be exclusivly evoked by the timbral interplay of the four voices, each emerging from a seperate loudspeaker.
About six years after the piece got premiered in Vienna, I revisited links234 following an invitation to Forum Opus in France. Being interested in the divide between real-time and non real-time music making, following Jean-Claude Risset's article "Composing in real-time?" (Contemporary Music Review 18:3, 1999), I wanted to turn a fixed composition it into a composed instrument that I could play on stage. This depicted quite the opposite path of the more common instrument-turned-into-a-composition way of working. Adapting a Gametrak controller, originally intended for playing golf on a computer screen, I was able to conduct the flow of the piece with gestures of both of my hands, adjusting parameters on the fly.