LJ White's "Attractive Forces"
Program notes:
LJ White's Attractive Forces premiered on March 12, 2021 with the Grossman Ensemble.
Attractive Forces is inspired by motion of submicroscopic particles, as understood through kinetic molecular theory. All matter is made of these particles, which are constantly moving, with varying amounts of kinetic energy depending on the state of matter, density of particles, temperature, pressure created by the size of the space, and any attraction between the particles themselves. This piece is put together in an analogous way. Much of the musical material is quite pointillistic, and it is not organized by traditional rhythmic and metric notation; rather, the players are given segments of time, in seconds, and a certain number of ordered pitches to distribute through each segment, within a loose hierarchy of note values that allows for variation. There are also parts where one player’s notes will trigger another’s, as if there are forces of attraction between the particles depicted by those pitches.