Our Primary Differences was nominated for the Gaudeamus Award 2013, and premiered at the festival by Pete Harden and Saskia Lankhoorn. In connection with my nomination, Radio 4 interviewed me about the work before the concert.

I thought it was time to go and mess around with prime numbers. After staring at the first pages of this infinite set, I hit upon the idea not to use the primes themselves, but the distances between them. These distances form the “rhythm” of the primes, which struck me as a more musical way of handling the material. For instance, the first ten primes {2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, ...} yield the gaps {1, 2, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, 4, 6, ...}. Some light Wikipedia-digging confirmed that this phenomenon is called “prime gaps.”

My first experiment—translating a portion of the list of gaps into a chromatic scale and additive rhythm—produced material that was unexpectedly funky and raw, with instant appeal. But immediately I faced a compositional problem: as the prime gaps gradually lengthen, the musical density and tension inevitably decrease. To counter this, I allowed myself increasing liberties as the piece progressed.

I chose piano (amplified) and down-tuned electric guitar to do the heavy lifting. Both instruments wriggle and squirm within this formal skeleton of numbers, straining and pushing against its boundaries until a primal dispute explodes into chaos. I gave the guitar a Whammy Pedal to tackle the absurdly large leaps I had written—it seemed only fair to give the piano one too.