Gordon Monro - "Parabolic Monody (Solo for Heebiephone)"

"Dry Choices"

List of pieces

"Study in Dimension 1.245"

"Parabolic Monody (Solo for Heebiephone)"

Tape piece, duration 6 mins 10 secs (1993)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia Licence.

Program note

Parabolic Monody is a contribution to that genre of pieces for solo instrument recognisable by the following characteristics.

The piece is written against the capabilities of the instrument: for example, an instrument capable of beautiful melodic lines won't be given any.
The piece uses a variety of extended techniques and is almost impossible to play.
The piece is apparently constructed using some quasi-mathematical framework that the listener cannot discern.
The piece is too long for the material, or the listener, or both.

For the present piece a heebiephone (in full, biventral heebiephone) was especially designed. It is an H-shaped instrument (hence the name), like two trombones joined with a cross-tube. It has two mouthpieces, two bells, five slides, and a range of more than 10 octaves. The heebiephone obviously requires inhuman virtuosity, and in fact it exists only in a computer program of the composer's. Naturally the heebiephone player has access to techniques denied to those who play more corporeal instruments.

Parabolic Monody is based on a repeating sequence of seven "notes", and has an embarrassingly simple arch structure, derived from a parabola. Almost all the heebiephone slide lengths used produce notes in the same pitch class. Two computer programs were written, one to generate the score for the piece (by a partly random process), and the other to play the score on the heebiephone. The piece was realised on a computer belonging to the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Sydney.

Performances, etc

Ball State University, (Muncie, Indiana), 28 September 1993.

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