GIOVANNI ALBINI will defend his doctoral thesis on June 14 at 12.00 in room A-402 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Music):

Transfiguring Conventional Music Elements
A Mathematically Informed Approach to Composition

Supervisor: Professor Kerri Kotta, PhD (EAMT)

Opponent: Hannu Pohjannoro, DMus (Tampere)

The doctoral thesis is available HERE and in print in the EAMT library

“… The general questions that had been the starting point of my artistic research are the following. How can mathematics serve to shape musical structures that grant a neat focus on traditional music elements and yet put them in a different perspective? And which of the several ways I could find are closer to my individual character, aesthetics and aims?

To answer these broad questions I took into analysis from a musicological standpoint the process of my former composition practice, recognizing some mathematically informed traits that I could thenreduce and formalize in three concepts of a specific structured compositional strategy of combinatorial nature, that I named 1) completeness, 2) exhaustiveness and 3) equality in repetition.

These three concepts naturally emerged in my own composition practice. Thereby, such study let me narrow down the aforesaid questions to a more specific one: the very research question of this text. How and why the three concepts of completeness, exhaustiveness and equality in repetition can serve to transfigure conventional musical elements offering useful tools for composers?” writes Giovanni Albini in the abstract of  his doctoral thesis.

See more here.