By transforming and combining the 9 Beet Stretch with existing elements of the participants’ work or other sources, their segment becomes a new piece of music belonging to a larger structure. The idea is to develop a system in which all components relate to one another as a whole but have enough individuality to stand as works in their own right.

The manifesto for this project states: “Don’t overthink it, experiment.”

The 9 Beet Stretch slows symphonic time so that movement is barely perceptible. What you hear in normal time as a happy Viennese melody lasting 5 or 10 seconds becomes minutes of slowly cascading overtones while a drumroll becomes a nightmarish avalanche. [d]  The participant musicians have experimented with granular synthesis, proprietary electronic processes, and organic sounds to elevate or normalize these stretched classical passages. The construction and manipulation of each segment have no limitations in terms of compositional values. It is impractical to think that audiences will listen to these recordings from beginning to end. Composing a score this long is quite an ambitious task, hence these compositions have been created according to the law of chance. Marshall McLuhan said: “When you brush media against other media, interesting and unexpected results often occur.” [e]  By means of pure experimentation Vs. careful composition the participant musicians have achieved extraordinary results.

THAT is the point of this exercise. However, the 9 Beet Stretch 2.0: Meta Tones remains recognizable in spirit if not in form, its frozen strings fraught with tense, frowning Beethoven-ness. Crawling across Beethoven’s magnum opus with a microscope, so to speak, with every note stretched out to 24 times its normal length, is frighteningly revealing. [f]

Each one of the participants has a very unique musical DNA. The visual iconography denotes everyone’s style. These icons have been used during the creation of the 9 Beet Stretch 2.0 to identify their placement in the audio timeline.

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_music / [b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_music
[c/d] https://www.quietamerican.org/9beet.html – [e] Ben Sisario, The New York Times – [f] Kyle Gann, The Village Voice – Marshall McLuhan – The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects Penguin Books