As you may know, I love using Sibelius to generate wacky rhythms, but one of my students, Ben Raker, showed me some in a piece of his today (50 minutes long!) that I’d never tried. For some reason I’ve generally shied away from tuplets-within-tuplets, but Ben had come up (accidentally, he admitted, by punching the tuplet button twice instead of once) with a scheme for a quasi-irrational but actually elegantly geometric acceleration and ritard:
Hear the result here.
I quickly realized you could get more gradual patterns with larger numbers:
Hear the result here.
– not to mention more complex quasi-irrational sequences:
Hear the result here. Looks like it’s back to the Disklavier for me. Oh, Henry Cowell, had you only lived to hear this.