It was time to put them to the test. For two weeks we’d pored over every corner of Max/MSP (excluding, of course, Jitter, OpenGL, gen~, and all of the other corners over which we had not pored). We’d laid bare the inner workings of the Fourier transform, polypholy and high-order filters. But what good was that technical knowledge unless it could be transmuted into art? I needed to know, could these powerful young composers make music to match their patching skills?

I gave them an almost impossible task: in three hours conceive, program and realize an improvised laptop performance. The piece would of course be an ode to Max itself, celebrating in three movements the three essential components Max. The first movement, represented by the letter ‘M’, stood for the aesthetic, for the visceral. The second, under the letter ‘A’, would call to mind the enlightened side of Max, the feeling of new understanding that comes with reading particularly good documentation. Of course Max also contains the chaotic and the glitchy, and this dark facet would rally under the letter ‘X’.

While the students worked, I created a graphic score for them to follow. They were divided into four groups of four, each represented by a different color and each responsible for their own range of frequencies. After two hours of programming, we had some time for questions and debugging. Finally, we quickly read through the score (I’d only finished two movements, M and X), and began to play.