This album in a birthday present to my wife, Yolanda Estes, on the occasion of her 59th birthday. Yolanda is a creative power. She is a professional, published philosopher with far ranging concerns, a fiction writer, and visual artist. Kind, erudite, funny, deeply concerned about others and the world, she brings a brilliant light to bear on reality. Happy Birthday, Yolanda!

This album is comprised of two short pieces for virtual pianos.

The first piece, Little Nod to Neo-classicism, is tuned in George Secor's rational 2/11-comma well temperament. Rhythmically, it is constructed out of four "seed sequences" that explore polyrhythms of 5:11, 7:11, 4:13, and 6:13, running simultaneously. Its four seed sequences are 55 (5X11), 77 (7X11), 52 (4X13), and 78 (6X13) beats long. Its pitch-world is derived from a melody of length 55 beats, in a phrygian scale: D, Eb, F, G, A, Bb, C.
But the work includes counter-melodies in other modes, and there is much use of transposition and inversion, in the piece, so it naturally moves into other tonal regions before returning home.

The second piece, Little Nod to Minimalism, is tuned in Paul Erlich's Hexachordal Scale, a 12-tone subset of 22-EDO. The steps in 22 EDO for this 12-tone scale are: 2,2,2,2,1,2,2,2,2,2,2,1. But the piece is a nod to minimalism, it never leaves a 7 note subset of this scale: C, D, Eb, F, G, A, Bb, the same notes that are the pitch germ of the first piece. Because it is derived from Erlich's hexachordal scale, this seven note scale has three wide major seconds, C-D, F-G, G-A, that are close to the JI ratio 8/7, and two narrow, neutral seconds, Eb-F, and Bb-C, which are very close to 11/10. The two minor seconds are close to 16/15. The major thirds come in two flavors, F-A, is wide, close to 9/7, Eb-G, and Bb-D, are very close to 5/4. The minor thirds are also in two flavors, G-Bb, and C-Eb are close to 6/5, and D-F, and A-C, are narrower, close to 7/6. Overall, the scale has a septimal coloring or flavor. This piece has sequences that are 30 (5X6), 32 (8X4), 35 (5X7), and 36 (9X4) beats long.

These pieces were produced with Max8, Reaper, and Pianoteq software. The Max software, a program or "patch" of my design, is a variable length Quad Step Sequencer, that supports having multiple tempos running simultaneously, and allows the user to change these tempos on the fly, either manually, or through a "meta score." It also supports automated or manual transposition, inversion, reversal of parts, rotation of parts, sorting of parts, and random transposition of notes by chosen intervals.

However, there was no random process involved in making these two pieces.

The photo is of Yolanda Estes in 2012, standing in front of one of her watercolors, part of a series of paintings called "Time and Space."