American Mavericks

Night or Madness


“Night or Madness” by Corey Cunningham is a piece assembled from several different jazz tunes. The notes were chosen through a series of chance operations to determine which tune to use, what measure to start in, how many notes to use, what note to start on, whether there would be silence or notes in the passage, and how many notes would be turned into rests. I then recorded the score, and then created an electronic collage of it. The title was also chosen using chance processes. In working with chance, I was amazed at how the recurrence of certain tunes in the process gave more formal definition to the piece.