Lyndon Canyon

2014
flute, live electronics
ca. 5 min.

Although a place with this name exists on the map of the world – it is a small stretch along the Saint Andrew’s Trench, south of the Bay Area in California – Lyndon Canyon is the musical sketch of an imaginary landscape, named after its formal sources of inspiration. The melodic motifs of this canon study correspond exclusively to Lyndon words, that is, elements of a set of strings defined by the mathematician Roger Lyndon. Pitch ranges of a certain extent become the alphabets of these formally ordered words. The rhythms map corresponding mathematical structures, a subset of non-periodic strings called bracelets, similar to Lyndon words. They unfold and vary by rotation within a metric cycle and by retrograding, and interlock in a complementary way as the flute enters into dialogue with itself through an electronic echo. The resulting canon is led more or less closely in four miniature sections by different delay times of the echo.

recording © 2014 GIMIK e.V. Cologne

Thomas Frey, flute
Bernd Härpfer, live electronics

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

first performance: Cologne, December 7, 2014