Mamoru Fujieda is internationally recognized as one of music's outstanding younger composers. Working with artists such as John Zorn, Yuji Takahashi, and Malcolm Goldstein, he composes music that emerges from his fascination with the essentially collaborative formation of music. Fujieda has developed methods of composition that depart from the minimalist tradition, charting a new terrain that liberates music from subjectivity by immersing it in a network of relationships. Among his numerous methods, he has pioneered a new structure of composition that he calls "parasitic," since it consists of grafting new material onto a "rhizome" of original melody borrowed from sources such as Bach, Gregorian chant, or medieval secular music. In the composition of the series “Patterns of Plants”, a system called "PLANTRON" was used for deriving data from plants. A "PLANTRON," consisting of an electrode attached to the leaf of a plant, an electric potential analyzer, a computer, and a tone generator, was developed by botanist Yuji Dogane to understand relationship between plants and the environment by observing changes in faint electric currents. By converting those electric currents to MIDI data, various melodic patterns are generated. The process of composition of the series involves listening to these patterns carefully, then laying out interesting ones in a piece. |
