Audient Music
Bellona was composed using CSound to render a score file created with Common Music.
download Bellona
download orc/sco files with .lisp files
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Audient Music
Bellona
I composed this piece using Common Music. It was my first, and so far only effort with Common Music. I'm not a programmer, so my understanding of Lisp was fairly shaky to begin with. I absolutely enjoyed using 
Common Music to generate the score file for CSound in Bellona. I have plans for more Common Music pieces, but I just haven't found the time to explore it more deeply yet. I was using Mac OS 9 at the time, rather than OS X. Lisp support was a bit hard to find for me, but once I got it set up properly on my G4 at work, things went smoothly. Fortunately for anyone wishing to use CM now, there is a wonderful new online book by Rick Taube. Eventually, my plan is to work through this book and try to actually understand what I am doing!
...
I had the idea to borrow Brian 
Eno's concept of Generative Music. It's probably best to follow that link to get the idea straight from the composer's mouth, so to speak, but as I saw it at the time, generative music is the idea of setting up a sound then having it repeat at various intervals against other sounds. This appealed to me primarily because it is a similar idea to Steve Reich's phase music and early tape pieces in which a recorded sound was looped against itself with one loop gradually slowed down. The resulting mosaic of sound is stunning.
Eno's take on this was to have one sound (three voices singing, or an electric piano chord, etc.) repeat at regular intervals. For example, the voices might repeat every 74 seconds while the electric piano might repeat every 92 seconds. What happens is that none of the sounds ever quite line up into a pattern. Or the pattern becomes so excruciatingly long that the listener gives up trying to follow it. And yet, the repetition itself is soothing and familiar.
My own take on this idea was to use motives that repeated at irregular intervals. I'm not really a "process" composer in the way that Reich or Eno (at least in Music for Airports) are. Rather, I tended to use this idea to construct subsections of the larger work in Bellona.
I used three CSound instruments
for my orchestra. Two of these instruments are quite simple. Common Music was used to "generate" the time intervals at which each motif would repeat. Where I diverge from the "process" of generative music is in the fact that I fudged a bit in when these time intervals are changed. For a true "process", the time intervals would be set up initially and then be left to run their courses. I was more involved in the decision making process than a "process composer" would have been. For me, that's no big deal. I'm writing music that I want to write. I'm borrowing Eno's idea, not copying it.
You can look at the orc and sco files if you like. You can also download them along with the .lisp files I used for Common Music. The sco file in particular is an ugly mess, but you can get the idea of how it was constructed by looking at the lisp files.
...
Bellona was the fictional apocalyptic city in 
Samuel
Delaney's Dahlgren. This book was wacky. I absolutely enjoyed
it though. ...to wound the autumnal city... I thought it would
be nice light reading for a beach vacation that year, but I was wrong.
It's one of those Ulysses stream-of-consciousness-type books. The
subject matter is quite "loopy". Events come and go in shifting temporal
order. One can't make heads or tails of where one is in the story most of
the time.
It's thoroughly disconcerting, but thoroughly wonderful. I won't go
into great depth about why I loved this book so much. Suffice it
to say, there are things in the book that I can relate to fairly easily.
That
probably ought to scare the hell out of you.... Nonetheless, the cyclical
stream of events and thoughts in Delaney's book
seemed a perfect fit for the music I was trying to write. In a sense
my piece was inspired by Dahlgren before I even read it.