JCselfmusic composes itself
JCselfJCself composes my brain
JCselfmy brain composes music
Sand on a vibrating plate. The grains jump at random. Where sand already lies, the plate grows calmer, so more of it stays there. One heap prevails and arranges all other grains around it. Every visit produces a different picture.
From chaos, a pattern emerges
JCself follows the principle of self-organisation. At first it chooses tones at random. Every tone that has sounded once becomes more likely afterwards. A centre of gravity emerges that nobody determined.
The physicist Hermann Haken coined the term synergetics for this: out of many disordered parts an order parameter emerges, which then governs all the other parts. In JCself this is the most frequent tone. Duration, loudness, spatial position and added voices of all other tones follow it.
Footpaths across a meadow, ant trails and river courses form by the same principle, and evolution too works with chance, selection and memory. The composer only sets the frame: range, tempo, instruments. Within that frame the music composes itself, and differently every time.
Between tonal and serial
JCself sits between two worlds of music. It combines the weighting of tonal music with the calculation of serial music.
Tonal
One tone carries weight and everything is ordered around it. The centre is fixed from the start.
JCself
Here too everything is ordered around a centre. But nobody placed it: it grows out of chance and is different every time.
Serial
Everything is calculated. No tone takes precedence; the order is spread evenly.