Andrián Pertout - Entelékheia (εντελέχεια) for Alto Flute-Concert Flute and Violoncello, no. 489 (2024)

NOMINATION: Work of the Year - Chamber

Nominator Statement

Pertouts Entelékheia (εντελέχεια) is among a collection of his works inspired by his experimental arts practice and a direct result of his collaborations over the years with American physicists Stefan Hollos and J. Richard Hollos that have focused on his own expansion and redesigning of existing ANSI C-coded programs. These program have been utilized to the invent algorithms for these algorithmic compositions that seek a balance between rationality and intuition, and therefore for Pertout it is all about finding musical solutions for the development of a musical grammar allowing for the composition of cutting-edge and innovative works. The conceptual depth of these works is also impressive, where Pertout, as he explains in academic lectures around the globe, is the result of every single work beginning with a title, and therefore a developed concept. The title and the concept in this case not an afterthought, or a lame attempt at giving the work some intellectual weight at the end of the creative process.

According to Pertout: Entelékheia (εντελέχεια) or Being serves as an exploration of one of the most important Aristotelian philosophical terms that etymologically derives from εντελής, entelás grown up (from εν, en in + τελος, telos aim, goal, end) + εχειν, ekhein to have. As such it means being at an end. Encyclopedia Britannica explains that the concept is intimately connected with Aristotles distinction between matter and form, or the potential and the actual. The work also serves as an exploration of heterophony a musical texture whereby two or more voices simultaneously perform variations of the same melody, but in contrast to conventional utilizations of this compositional device of a relatively aleatoric vertical alignment of intervals, the work adopts an organic, or intuitively-driven invention of a basic theme subjected to an extensive compositional process of expansion that employs a set of algorithms, or automatons to construct the melodic and rhythmic counterpoint, generating an even more elaborate indeterminate structure. The intuitive-counterintuitive compositional methodology conforming to the composers artistic ideals of implementing novel ideas in conjunction with intuitive compositional strategies in order to achieve a balance between intuition and rationality. The abovementioned melodic content is adorned by a very unusual scale invented by American Computer Science and Engineering specialist Timothy Normand Miller, utilizing a mathematical machine learning model of chord consonants or dissonance that he personally developed. In his mathematical model, Miller limits the results to heptatonic (seven-note) scales and four-note simultaneities that include triads and tetrads (trichords and tetrachords) within the chromatic scale (bound by Western musics twelve-tone equal temperament), and via the establishment of a machine learning method and a mathematical description of a chord (in order to turn a chord into numbers) applies linear regression to generate a mathematical model guided by output values that are positive for consonant chords and negative for excessively dissonant chords.