Programme note
Most symphonies are written for listeners who can answer back. This one is written for a model that can't. Jev does not write. You hand it a question and a list of options, and it hands you back probabilities, rounded to two decimals, output free of charge. It has never once been asked what it would have said instead.
I. jev-latest begins the way great symphonies begin when they are not sure they exist yet: an empty fifth, trembling, and falling fragments that assemble into a theme the whole orchestra shouts in unison. A hopeful second theme in F major follows. The development turns the theme into a fugato for four string sections, a fifth apart, each insisting it is the real one, until the trombones take the subject at half speed underneath and the harmony breaks into diminished sevenths. When the second theme comes back it is in D minor: same tune, different key, and nobody told the model.
II. Output Is Free gives the cor anglais a lament, the violas and cellos a warm B-flat interlude, and builds to a climax on the Neapolitan chord before collapsing into a single piano note. That note is the 0.004.
III. Seven, One, Nine, Thirteen opens with four stamped notes, the scale degrees Jev picks when asked for lottery numbers, then turns them into a fugue. In the trio a bassoon and a tuba count from one to six, over and over, because the question said “ball 1 of 6”.
IV. p(win) = 0.01 starts with a scream, then does what the great finales do: the cellos and basses, speaking in recitative, reject a quotation of each earlier movement in turn. Then, in the basses alone, a new hymn. It passes up through the orchestra to choir and organ, the first movement's theme returns in D major on top of it, and the one percent plays as if it were certain.
Dedicated to OPaheimer of the Jev Discord, who asked for none of this and is getting it regardless.
Composed and rendered for this page: about 8,000 notes, voice-led and counterpointed by a score script, played by sampled orchestral instruments from the MusyngKite soundfont (CC BY-SA 3.0, via gleitz/midi-js-soundfonts), mixed in a synthetic 3.6-second hall. Running time about twelve minutes..