Seafarer Press | Elizabeth Alexander, composer

Fractals
bassoon, piano

Fractals are intricate pictures which bear an uncanny resemblance to many images found in nature -- coastlines, clouds, cells, lightning bolts, clusters of stars. But for all their complexity, fractals are generated using simple and concise recipes, often straightforward computer programs no more than four or five lines long.

Like visual fractals, these pieces use extremely simple ideas as points of departure, gaining their complexity through the layering and combining of these ideas. Each of the five movements shares its name --- and some of its characteristics --- with particular classes of Fractals, as defined and named by the mathematician Benoit Mandlebrot.