Mark Gould

NEWS

Just bought my own domain name, www.equiton.net, and will be making some revisions over the coming weeks

About me

Born in 1969, I grew up and have lived in the South of England ever since, except for a brief sojourn to Malta in the 70s. From 1988 to 1992 I was at Southampton University, reading Acoustics, and graduated with a 2nd Class Honours Degree. I now live in Emsworth.

In my spare time, I write music and paint. I did begin a PhD in Music in 2002 but was unable to continue it for health reasons. In November 2005, I was awarded the Licentiate of Trinity College London (LTCL), in Music Composition, gaining 83% overall. Currently I am working - slowly - towards my Fellowship (FTCL).

From 1995 I have worked at Astrium as variously a Mechanical Engineer, a Software Engineer, and recently I have changed roles again and am now a Senior Systems Engineer.

My email is mark@equiton.net

Music

A significant amount of my spare time is taken up with composing music, and writing about music. One of my interests is Microtonality, and I have had an article published by Perspectives of New Music.

I am also interested in music notation, and have developed a new rhythmic notation for Equiton. You can see the results here. Also, I've provided some music paper for you to try Equiton out.

Among my other interests is Twelve-Tone Tonality, a compositional-theoretical idea developed by George Perle. This idea extends the concepts of symmetry to an over-arching tonal principle. What's interesting about this theory is that it develops principles used by composers in the preserial post-tonal period into a coherent concept. Perle's book by the same name is worth a read, even if it's quite hard to understand.

Publications

Balzano and Zweifel: Another look at Generalised Diatonic Scales, Perspectives of New Music Vol 38/2, Summer 2000, p88-105.

Works

I have written about 100 works of music, one of which, for 1/4-tone vibraphone, was performed at the Barbican. Please email me if you are interested in my work; I may already have a work for your instrument or ensemble.

Microtonality

My principal focus with microtonality is the formulation of analogues to tonality within scales that have a different number of notes than 12 to the octave. There are two interesting features of this investigation: the first being that scales can be found that have scale structures patterned after the keyboard of seven white and five black keys we are familiar with; the second flows from the finding of circles analogous to the circle of fifths in the familiar twelve-note scale.

I am hoping to put a fuller essay on this website soon. For the moment, I have prepared some midi files of music written in a circle derived from an interval of 7/19ths of an octave. This scale has 11 notes in it, and reads 22122212221, so as a piano keyboard it would look like a normal keyboard except that there would be an extra region of keys as if the keys from F to B were repeated, like so:

Twelve-Tone Tonality

As I stated above, I also have an interest in the theoretical contructs proposed by George Perle as a solution to the problem of harmony in a twelve-note context. Soon, I shall be presenting more material here, including an article on the correspondences between the idea of symmetry an tonality in both Perle and Erno Lendvai, a theorist who presents an alternative view on the music of Bartok, but also introduces a tonal concept which is startling in its simplicity and its completeness.

Twelve-Note Music

A continuing part of my musical technique is the 'Method' as Schoenberg preferred to call the idea that came to him in the 1920's. Most deride the Method as merely composing with numbers, and certainly perhaps some twelve-note music does attempt to be as unlike normal music as possible. But that was mostly in the 1950's and 60's when every contemporary composer was determined to write a totally new music.

As a technique, it is a very good starting point for composers as its rules are in fact quite simple. Most annoying to the traditionalist are the rules of harmony: there aren't any; instead the composer must use their ear when distributing the notes of the twelve-note series in their music. This is where abstract composers diverge from real ones: abstractionists think 'notes one and two in Piano, notes three through six in Flute as theme, notes seven and eight in Horns, note nine on trumpet, and notes ten through twelve on harp.' But just what do these combinations sound like? The abstractionist doesn't care, everything is consonant and equally so. To the real composer, they see the real notes, and form their music accordingly; no formulas for writing music there.

As for my own twelve-note music? Well, I try to be as real a composer as possible, even if I don't always succeed.