Aside from all technical and theoretical pursuits, most importantly, the computer allows me to play my own music. Settling on a final performance seems very much like practicing pieces on the piano used to be: How should phrases be shaped? Which voices should be brought out? How fast should the music go? For the last four decades I have been playing with three primary tools, two of which can only be done with computers: 1) Shaping melodies, on the beat and measure level, with an interrelated set of ratios; and playing them, often overlapped, at different speeds. 2) Using twelve-tone sets that order and reorder three ascending diminished-seventh cycles rather the chromatic scale. Transpositions of themes are more like cousins to one-another than siblings. 3) Generating sounds by pure mathematical processes, many of which produce a wide range of timbres. For its first few minutes Private Practice works with a number of themes with increasing complexity and intensity. It then settles into what seems an inescapable trance, only to be interrupted, Surprise Symphony – like, by a return to the beginning material, and then proceeding to a close. -Joel Gressel
