A Numbers Game

Miniature duet for Bb Clarinet and Bb Trumpet. PDF also available to purchase at micahmooney.com Writing "A Numbers Game" was indeed a game for me and I hope it would also be taken as a game for both the audience and performers alike. There are four numerical sequences involved in the piece: squares (1, 4, 9, 16), cubes (1, 8, 27), Fibonacci (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8), and triangles (1, 3, 6, 10). There are also 4 performance parts: the clarinet, the trumpet, the voices, and the feet (the latter two being shared between both performers). For each part, each numerical sequence determines a different musical event. For example, the trumpet plays a short melody according to the squares, switches this melody according to the cubes, changes dynamics according to triangles, and changes articulation technique according to the Fibonacci numbers. The piece starts with number 144 (both a square and part of the Fibonacci sequence) and counts down, eighth note by eighth note, until the last note of the piece (equivalent to number 1). Along the way, every time a number from one of the series is met, a different event is triggered in each voice. These self-imposed rules turned the compositional process into a game of sorts, and now it is your turn to try to find as many number patterns in the music as possible!