electronics pre-recorded

Composer's note:
The Line Between was written with an enormous amount of flexibility and rhythmic freedom in mind; not a lot of concern for strict synchronicity between voice and tape within phrases. The music allows the singer to be free within the bounds of sounds which are, by necessity, fixed. The lack of strict rhythmic correlation creates a sense of “communal prayer” which is heard very clearly at several points (perhaps most notably in the final minute).

There are many moments (the very first phrase, for example) where the singer has a great deal of freedom in tempo; often the tape part emerges without a clear beginning from the singer’s pitch. In such cases—and, really, throughout the piece—the singer is encouraged to treat a phrase’s internal rhythms with some freedom. Again, the composer is drawing on the aural image of prayer chants; both the variation one might hear as different chanters lead a prayer, and the heterophony that emerges as a group chants ‘together.’

composer's comment: "a backdrop of electronic timbres and textures that virtually surround the soprano and bathe her in an alien soundscape of flamboyant, yet compelling, musical colors."

Dedicated to and premiered by pianist Philip Mead, at the 1990 International Computer Music Conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

Named after cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard, a Shepard scale is an audio illusion in which a scale seems to rise endlessly, without getting higher. The constituent pitches consist of several simultaneous octaves, which fade out at the top of the scale and fade in at the bottom. Taken out of the moving context, the actual octave register of a note is ambiguous to the ear.

A toy piano displays similar ambiguity: as the length of the sounding rods at lowest keys is too short to produce a true bass note, its overtones are louder than its fundamental pitch. Taken out of context the lowest F can sound more like its C overtone, an octave and a fifth higher. This ambiguity is part of the charm of the toy piano, and Shepard’s Pi enjoys playing with that charm, with lots of scales that seem not to get higher, sonorities whose octave register is ambiguous, and moments where the meter and tempo could be heard in several different ways. Oh yes, pi. Just as pi = 3.14159265. . ., so too Shepard’s Pi has slightly more than three electronically produced sounds (all derived from the sound of the toy piano), sections, and tempi.