RAGTIME ROBOTO

This piece began in 2012 as a technical excercise while developing my Transformation Engine music- composition software. The particular software function I was developing involved continuous transformations of rhythm, especially smooth acceleration or deceleration of one rhythmic pattern against another, a performance technique traditionally known as ‘rubato.’

The software worked. At the time, as proof-of-concept I was able to record a number of computer- generated passages for piano where the right and left hands were performed (by the computer) in this rubato fashion. For fun, I called these passages Rubato Roboto, a pun on the fact that the rubato was performed by a computer, i.e. a ‘robot’.

Ten years later, when I was asked to supply a short piece for a planned CD by pianist Alexander Panizza, I put forward my earlier Rubato experiments, with the proviso that they would need to be extended and re-structured. But a major difficulty remained, which was that the original experimental passages would now have to be re-written in a human-readable way, i.e. as traditional sheet music. Strictly speaking, this was impossible due to the continuous nature of the rhythmic transformations created by the software. The accelerations and decelerations were therefore re-conceived as discrete changes from normal notes to triplets, then to quadruplets, quintuplets, etc. This gave an unexpectedly successful impression of the previously smooth and continuous rhythmic transformations.

The other important contribution to this piece involves the strange jazz prodigy, Art Tatum (1909-1956), whose music had been my initial insiration for writing the rhythmic transformation functions in the software. While certainly not robotic, Tatum’s music is sometimes amazingly virtuosic, seemingly impossibly so at times. Self-taught and nearly completely blind, he learned as a child to play piano by ear. His life spanned the history of jazz from its roots in ragtime and blues, through stride to the sophisticated bebop of the 1 950s.

The result of these various ingredients is Ragtime Roboto. I hope you enjoy it. – Bruno Degazio