Output details

To See the Dark Between : for 2 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos and piano

Commissioned by the RPS and Wigmore Hall

First Performance: Aronowitz Ensemble, Wigmore Hall, London 09/05/10

Subsequently performed by Aronowitz Ensemble, Kammermusik Bodensee, 21/08/11

CD: Sonimage SON11202

'To See the Dark Between' is the first piece in which my creative questions were focused on the manipulation of microtones – how they can be used melodically and harmonically; how they can function so as to generate tangible musical direction; how they can interact with non-microtonal material to set up contrasting musical spaces or the potential for dramatic conflict.

While not strictly ‘spectral’, this piece relates to that school of thought, as the starting point was to imagine a fantasy type of audio analysis of the opening piano strikes that revealed a highly active internal structure, full of melodies and dances. Although the microtonal collections in this piece are derived from the harmonic series, their use is not related to spectral approaches. In this piece the application of microtones is linear and melodic: discrete pitches in an octave-repeating 24-tET environment rather than ‘best approximations’ of a harmony-timbre.

This piece presents a journey across three different interpretations of microtonality. First the quarter-tone pitches emerge out of noise, becoming part of a single microtonal environment that is primarily vertical – a repeating sequence of four chords. In the second section, the quarter-tones are reinterpreted as expressive bends, acting now as a particular colouration of a standard 12-tET environment. Finally there is a passage in which the microtonal world is one of three simultaneous environments.

The overriding concern was to find musical situations in which the piano and strings could combine to operate as a single sonic entity. The large-scale structure as well as the process for each section was broadly modelled on the precipitation of independent strands from a composite, fused sound.