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Circuitperson began with the idea of using a set of notes and presenting the entire set of combinations of those notes in order; this corresponds conceptually to presenting all binary numbers of a certain length (or, say, all possible “on-off” combinations of a set of circuitbreakers). I chose a seven-note set which contains a maximum of tetrachord types, and throughout the piece I cycle through its twelve possible transpositions. As the piece progresses, I use increasingly large subsets of the scale (beginning with one note) to derive these binary patterns, and the last statement of the piece uses the entire seven notes. There is also a general extramusical idea: the work moves through numerous moods, in much the same way that a person might. Complex as they are, our emotions are a function of our circuitry.
