Pattern as a Compositional Tools - Audio Examples
A relatively new Japanese band named Tricot plays something called Math Music that includes intricate patterns played on guitars, bass and drums.
An earlier and more complex form of this patterning hit the guitar world in 1982 with the title track of the album "Discipline" by King Crimson led by Robert Fripp and featuring Adrian Belew on guitar and Tony Levin on stick (bass). Don't forget drummer Bill Bruford, who actually devised the original rhythmic pattern of 17 beats per measure. [Well, that sounds complex. It is really 3 bars of 4 and 1 bar of 5, or more simply, 4 bars of 4 with 1 extra note at the end.]
Here is another performance with a description by Drummer Bill Buford and then some commentary from Fripp. Robert reveals that the guitars are playing in 5's over that beat. (OMG, intelligent musicians!)
An even earlier example of this way of working comes from Steve Reich who played a variation of this piece entitled "6 Marimbas" live at Tyler in the late 1970's. This style of compositions sometimes called Minimalism and is also employed by Philip Glass.
This video shows one way of creating pattern alterations. It is another Steve Reich piece called "Clapping Music" that is simply played by 2 people clapping. This is analogous to the structure of "6 Marimbas".
And all of this is taken to its logical conclusion in a half-hour long composition called "Ec(s)tasis" based on a pattern of 19 notes in the sequence 3, 4, 3, 4, 5, composed in 1989. This piece begins with this sequence played extremely slowly with very elongated notes to create clouds of sound. The duration of the notes gradually shortens and their tempo quickens at the same time. This process accelerates continually until the notes get so fast that they turn back into clouds of sound (sometimes called tone clusters). This is partially an attempt to recreate the structure of the universe where galaxies and subatomic particles have similar structure at opposite ends of the size spectrum.
