A Suffusion of Yellow
| Year | 2007 |
| Time | 5:26 |
| Size | 7.48 MB |
For solo piano. This is something of a tribute piece for Douglas Adams, one of my favorite human beings. The harmonies I use are tertian block chords, but they move in non-functional ways, often to accompany octatonic passages. It was performed live on November 29, 2007 by Nicole Valadez and on November 16, 2009 by Saul Iruegas.
“The electronic I Ching calculator was badly made. [...] It was much like an ordinary pocket calculator, except that the LCD screen was a little larger than usual in order to accommodate the abridged judgments of King Wen on each of the sixty-four hexagrams, and also the commentaries of his son, the Duke of Chou, on each of the lines of each hexagram. [...]
“The device also functioned as an ordinary calculator, but only to a limited degree. It could handle any calculation which returned an answer of anything up to 4. 1 + 1 it could manage (2) and 1 + 2 (3) and 2 + 2 (4) or tan 74 (3.4874145), but anything above 4 it represented merely as ‘A Suffusion of Yellow.’ Dirk was not certain if this was a programming error or an insight beyond his ability to fathom.”
- Douglas Adams
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), p. 104
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