The "Wieniawski Octad" is a series of eight digitally altered variants of a short excerpt from the beginning of the eponymous Polish violinist-composer's Etude-Caprice Op. 10, no. 5 ("Alla Saltarella"), based on an mp3 recorded by my friend, violinist Tony Fusco. It was completed on July 10—Wieniawski's birthday.

Although it is still possible to discern some of the original Etude-Caprice (E-flat Major) in my wild and wooly reworking, the intention was to filter the Wieniawski snippet so completely through a twenty-first century lens that it would emerge as something that sounds strikingly "new," thus demonstrating that the art of the present is, even at it most extreme, essentially a reconfiguration of the past. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, "The old forest is decomposed for the composition of the new forest."

The final results are somewhat humorous and "capricious," but everything was undertaken with a view towards making real art—even if the piece is sure to give most tonally inclined ears a ride through some pretty rugged and exotic virtual garden soundscapes. All of the following digital effects available in MOTU's Digital Performer were used to transform the original violin solo: chorus, delay, dynamics, flanger, reverb, reverse, ring modulator, sonic modulator, and spectral (transposition).

• Variant 1 evokes the relentless power and efficiency of an outdoor electric motor—perhaps a miniature race car or a particularly voracious weed-whacker? It is far removed in sound from the original mp3, yet entirely derived from it.
• Variant 2 squeals stridently in reverse, as the wind seems to blow oddly in the background.
• Variant 3 retains the rhythmic outline and something of the melodic contour of the original Wieniawski snippet, but invests the material with a striking new identity.
• Variant 4 is a whimsical reversal of the original that whistles merrily along.
• Variant 5 humorously retains the rhythm and some of the melodic contour of the Wieniawski excerpt, concluding with a decidedly percussive "triple stop" transposed into the bass register.
• Variant 6 only hints at the original, in reverse. Something of the rhythmic and melodic identity of the Wieniawski snippet are vaguely detectable.
• Variant 7 is a free, mischievously corrosive lilliputian canon in which the original melodic contours and rhythms are still evident.
• Variant 8 audibly retains only the phrase structure and dynamics of the original mp3, ending with a percussive punch.

In the accomanying animation, I have placed Wieniawski in my own fanciful recreations of the gardens at Peterhof (based on photographs I took in 2002), but chaos theory prompted me to insert a few capricious excursions to some other at least tangentially related people and places, without whose influence this multimedia project would never have been possible.

delian@newmusicclassics.com