[r-t] Compositions of the Decade: Part 9 - Maximus

[Mark Davies]

Philip writes,

 > Indeed, the nine and a bit courses of tenors-together maximus is
 > sufficiently small that David Hull published complete composition
 > collections for methods like Cambridge over the decade. If people
 > want to do new things here, they’ll have to broaden their horizons

Yes, and in fact the tenors-together search space is also completely 
exhaustable with up to three types of call - for instance, standard bobs 
and singles and a big bob - and for every lead head type (mx methods 
such as Avon need a fair old run-time though). For methods like Bristol 
Max, the search space with the 7th in for the 357642 course is also 
exhaustable in a sensible time frame.

I have been through every tenors-together peal for Bristol Max up to 
5280. I can't remember how many of them there were - quite a few - I 
only kept the best few hundred thousand! But even though the space can 
be searched exhaustively by machine, there is still a big job to do 
mining this result set for the best examples. Just picking the absolute 
highest music counts doesn't always give you the pick of the bunch. It 
needs a composer's eye.

MBD