Go Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke
Go Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke is a 30 minute work using the moves of 1953 championship game of Go as stimulus for harmonic, rhythmic and melodic material. It’s an experiment in extracting musical ideas from abstract patterns and sequences, and allowing these ideas to develop intuitively into a large-scale work.
“I’m drawn to the game of Go because it combines two of my major interests: Japanese culture, and complexity that emerges from simple processes,” composer Chris Perren explains. Go is played on a grid with small black and white stones, and operates on simple rules – basically, if your stones are surrounded by the enemy, they die. From this basic principle flows a great deal of complexity.
The compositional process was in two main phases: extracting musical ideas from the go game, and intuitively developing those ideas.
Using the sequences, their positions, proximities, and relative danger or safety of the moves, I cooked up systems to translate them pleasingly into rhythms, melodies, or sequences of chords. From there I responded fairly intuitively to the materials which had emerged in this process, allowing their character to dictate the direction. The ideas slowly grew outward in an organic process of pruning and elaboration.
The work exists in its final form as three movements, each in a kind of ternary form, surrounded by a prelude and postlude. The first and last sections of each main movement are similar – sort of like variations of each other.
| Prelude (90bpm) |
| Ia (144bpm) | Ib (96bpm) | Ic (144bpm) |
| IIa (105bpm) | IIb (75bpm) | IIc (105bpm) |
| IIIa (80bpm) | IIIb (100bpm) | IIIc (90bpm) |
| Postlude (60bpm) |
released April 27, 2015 on bigo and twigetti
Produced by Thomas Green and Nonsemble.
Recorded by Thomas Green at his place and at UQ Nickson Room in 2014-15.
Artwork by Naoya Kobayashi
Mixed by Thomas Green.
Mastered by Ben Wiffen.
Composed by Chris Perren.
Performed by Hik Sugimoto (Drums, Glockenspiel), Flora Wong (Violin), Samuel Andrews (Violin), Kieran Welch (Viola), Briony Luttrell (Cello), Samuel Mitchell (Piano) and Chris Perren (Guitar, Bass Guitar)