Koepf's EditionsCompositions – Bach goes Escher
German

Bach goes Escher
for string orchestra

Siegfried Koepf 2021

Program note

Bach goes Escher is a musical sculpture. The duration of the piece is basically unlimited and is determined individually for each performance. In analogy to Maurits Cornelis Escher's Ascending and Descending or Lionel and Roger Penrose's Impossible Staircase, this music creates an acoustic illusion of infinitely ascending sounds. The piece consists of perpetually ascending phrases in the style of a Bach Invention, fading in from zero in the low frequency range, sounding most present in the middle, and fading out toward zero in the high frequency range. This creates the contradictory impression of a process which is sequencing upward endlessly while the sound image in the mid-frequency range remains the same.

From the program booklet of Computing Music XII – Algorithmic music for string orchestra, 2022.12.05, Cologne, Alte Feuerwache