Dream Mirror (2010)
(Sharespace I)

Composer note
Dream Mirror arises out of two short, contrasted studies for solo guitar: imAge/guitar, and imagE/guitar. The former has an articulate, forceful, character, the latter an evocative, gentle one. In the more elaborate and expansive duo Dream Mirror, the guitar is joined by a computer musician who uses four algorithmic processes (PROLIF, SMEARZ, MATRIX, and THINNR) to process brief phrases or motives drawn from the guitar materials. These instrumental samples serve as “seeds” from which the computer processes — always under the careful stewardship of the computer musician as a performer in real-time — generate an organically evolving fabric of sound that acts both as a “setting” against which the guitar spins out its materials, and also as a protagonist in itself, instigating changes in the guitarist’s behavior or interactively commenting upon its assertions. The guitar is the voice of the piece, but computer musician partner manifests both its memories and anticipations.

The two seminal guitar solos each have two primary parts, one conceived of as metaphorically “real” while the other is its “dreamed” complement. And in the derived duo, the computer musician acts as a transformative mirror, sending back to the guitarist (or anticipating beforehand…) transformed versions, a kind of dreamscape, of his/her instrumental materials. Dreams and mirrors always have seemed to me related in that they offer to us versions of what we believe we know but that remains, sometimes, stubbornly outside our understanding.

Dream Mirror was written for guitarist Pablo Gómez Cano and computer musician Jaime Oliver and was sponsored by Calit2, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technologies at UCSD. It was premiered by them at Centro Mexicano para la Música y Artes Sonoras Conservatorio de las Rosas in Morelia, Mexico on 1 April 2011.

— Roger Reynolds