November '52 is part of composer Earle Brown's most famous collection of work titled Folio which includes October '52, November '52 and December '52, the last being his most well known. I designed a MIDI interface, called Conde Marrón, specifically as a visual interpretation of the score along with custom software to perform the piece. My realization was comissioned for April Guthrie's retrospective of Earle Brown's work performed at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles by friends and collegues of the late composer.

"Then, with November '52 (Synergy), I just lined in between the 5-line staves of regular music paper, making more fields of possibility. I used standard quarter notes, half notes, et cetera. But now, I've taken away left-to-right. Those images can be considered floating in space, moving forward and backward. If they're coming toward you, it's a crescendo; if they're going away from you, a diminuendo. They can be higher or lower; it's multi-spatial. The things are on moving tracks. You can go from any point to any other point in any direction. If there's a half-note over here, and an eighth-note over there, and they happen to coincide here, boom! they could be played simultaneously. Taking that to its logical conclusion, the tracks could all end up together, with one huge chord cluster. Or, if you consider the space collapsing from left to right and right to left, and from top to bottom and bottom to top, everything will meet at the center and just [Earle makes a loud popping sound] single note!"

Earle Brown as interviewed by John Yaffe - September 25,1995

More from this interview.
For more information on Earle Brown visit the Earle Brown Foundation

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My realization of Earle Brown's "November '52" began by deciding what frequencies the pitches represent. I started with a fundamental frequency of 52 Hz in honor of the title. I then arbitrarily decided on a seven octave range and allowed each line or space in the score to represent a pitch. Each pitch then can be sharp or flat, this gives a total of 198 possible pitches. To obtain the frequencies of those pitches I derived the 198th root of 128 thereby creating an equal temperament over seven octaves. (128 is the ratio of seven octaves - 2⁷ or 6656 Hz:52 Hz).

This is similar to our standard western tuning derived from the 12th root of 2 for twelve semi-tones per octave. To get the next semi-tone you simply multiply by the previous one by the ratio (in this case 1.024807923531:1). This tuning achieves slightly greater than 28 divisions of the octave. However, the only 'in tune' octaves are seven octaves apart.
All rhythmic and dynamic elements are executed based on the indications in the score during the performance using a linear, left-to-right reading.

List of 30 frequencies for November '52 rounded to three places (some pitches are repeated in the score):

75.1 Hz, 82.834 Hz, 95.954 Hz, 116.736 Hz, 122.600 Hz, 149.152 Hz, 152.852 Hz, 181.455 Hz, 268.565 Hz, 282.055 Hz, 343.142 Hz, 360.378 Hz, 397.492 Hz, 417.459 Hz, 438.428 Hz, 507.871 Hz, 809.022 Hz, 914.477 Hz, 1112.532 Hz, 1353.482 Hz, 1567.860 Hz, 1861.250 Hz, 2103.861 Hz, 2320.528 Hz, 2964.911 Hz, 3191.090 Hz, 4178.364 Hz, 4608.676 Hz, 5888.449 Hz, 6184.234 Hz