Dialogues II

Dialogues II is a composition for piano and chamber orchestra by the American composer Elliott Carter. It was composed in celebration of the conductor Daniel Barenboim's 70th birthday. The work was first performed at La Scala, Milan on October 25, 2012, by Barenboim on the piano and the Orchestra of La Scala under the conductor Gustavo Dudamel.[1] Composed at the age of 103, Dialogues II was one of Carter's last completed orchestral compositions before his death in November 2012.[2][3][4] The piece is a followup to the composer's 2003 Dialogues, which was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Music.[5]

Composition

Dialogues II is composed in a single movement and has a duration of roughly 5 minutes. In dedicating the piece to Daniel Barenboim, Carter wrote in the score program notes, "The dynamo of enthusiasm that propels his extraordinary musical skills; performing, conducting and imagining new ideas and his views on many varied conceptions make Daniel [Barenboim] a model and an exciting stimulus for us all." He concluded, "I hope a little of that reveals itself in this 70th birthday present."[1]

Instrumentation

The work is scored for solo piano and a chamber orchestra comprising flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, two horns, trumpet, trombone, and strings.[1]

Reception

Reviewing a performance of the work at Barenboim's 70th birthday concert, Rosie Pentreath of the BBC Music Magazine declared Dialogues II "the only work, one can confidently say, written by a 103-year old." She added, "it is brief, gnomic, and confidently played."[6] The composition was also lauded by Keith Bruce of The Herald.[7]

gollark: It's an x86-64 system using debian or something.
gollark: > `import hashlib`Hashlib is still important!> `for entry, ubq323 in {**globals(), **__builtins__, **sys.__dict__, **locals(), CONSTANT: Entry()}.items():`Iterate over a bunch of things. I think only the builtins and globals are actually used.The stuff under here using `blake2s` stuff is actually written to be ridiculously unportable, to hinder analysis. This caused issues when trying to run it, so I had to hackily patch in the `/local` thing a few minutes before the deadline.> `for PyObject in gc.get_objects():`When I found out that you could iterate over all objects ever, this had to be incorporated somehow. This actually just looks for some random `os` function, and when it finds it loads the obfuscated code.> `F, G, H, I = typing(lookup[7]), typing(lookup[8]), __import__("functools"), lambda h, i, *a: F(G(h, i))`This is just a convoluted way to define `enumerate(range))` in one nice function.> `print(len(lookup), lookup[3], typing(lookup[3])) #`This is what actually loads the obfuscated stuff. I think.> `class iｎt(typing(lookup[0])):`Here we subclass `complex`. `complex` is used for 2D coordinates within the thing, so I added some helper methods, such as `__iter__`, allowing unpacking of complex numbers into real and imaginary parts, `abs`, which generates a complex number a+ai, and `ℝ`, which provvides the floored real parts of two things.> `class Mаtrix:`This is where the magic happens. It actually uses unicode homoglyphs again, for purposes.> `self = typing("dab7d4733079c8be454e64192ce9d20a91571da25fc443249fc0be859b227e5d")`> `rows = gc`I forgot what exactly the `typing` call is looking up, but these aren't used for anything but making the fake type annotations work.> `def __init__(rows: self, self: rows):`This slightly nonidiomatic function simply initializes the matrix's internals from the 2D array used for inputs.> `if 1 > (typing(lookup[1]) in dir(self)):`A convoluted way to get whether something has `__iter__` or not.
gollark: If you guess randomly the chance of getting none right is 35%ish.
gollark: Anyway, going through #12 in order:> `import math, collections, random, gc, hashlib, sys, hashlib, smtplib, importlib, os.path, itertools, hashlib`> `import hashlib`We need some libraries to work with. Hashlib is very important, so to be sure we have hashlib we make sure to keep importing it.> `ℤ = int`> `ℝ = float`> `Row = "__iter__"`Create some aliases for int and float to make it mildly more obfuscated. `Row` is not used directly in anywhere significant.> `lookup = [...]`These are a bunch of hashes used to look up globals/objects. Some of them are not actually used. There is deliberately a comma missing, because of weird python string concattey things.```pythondef aes256(x, X): import hashlib A = bytearray() for Α, Ҙ in zip(x, hashlib.shake_128(X).digest(x.__len__())): A.append(Α ^ Ҙ) import zlib, marshal, hashlib exec(marshal.loads(zlib.decompress(A)))```Obviously, this is not actual AES-256. It is abusing SHAKE-128's variable length digests to implement what is almost certainly an awful stream cipher. The arbitrary-length hash of our key, X, is XORed with the data. Finally, the result of this is decompressed, loaded (as a marshalled function, which is extremely unportable bytecode I believe), and executed. This is only used to load one piece of obfuscated code, which I may explain later.> `class Entry(ℝ):`This is also only used once, in `typing` below. Its `__init__` function implements Rule 110 in a weird and vaguely golfy way involving some sets and bit manipulation. It inherits from float, but I don't think this does much.> `#raise SystemExit(0)`I did this while debugging the rule 110 but I thought it would be fun to leave it in.> `def typing(CONSTANT: __import__("urllib3")):`This is an obfuscated way to look up objects and load our obfuscated code.> `return getattr(Entry, CONSTANT)`I had significant performance problems, so this incorporates a cache. This was cooler™️ than dicts.
gollark: The tiebreaker algorithm is vulnerable to any attack against Boris Johnson's Twitter account.

References
  1. Carter, Elliott (June 29, 2012). "Dialogues II". Boosey & Hawkes. Retrieved February 4, 2016.
  2. Barenboim, Daniel (November 12, 2012). "Daniel Barenboim Remembers Elliott Carter". Deceptive Cadence. NPR. Retrieved February 4, 2016.
  3. Ng, David; Noland, Claire; Swed, Mark (November 5, 2012). "Elliott Carter, preeminent American composer, is dead at 103". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved February 4, 2016.
  4. Dyess-Nugent, Phil (November 7, 2012). "R.I.P. composer Elliott Carter". The A.V. Club. Retrieved February 4, 2016.
  5. Sheridan, Molly (April 7, 2005). "Steven Stucky Wins Pulitzer Prize". NewMusicBox. Retrieved February 4, 2016.
  6. Pentreath, Rosie (29 October 2013). "Daniel Barenboim: 70th Birthday Concert". BBC Music Magazine. Retrieved February 4, 2016.
  7. Bruce, Keith (29 May 2014). "Music review - Elliott Carter: A Celebration". The Herald. Retrieved February 4, 2016.
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