Output details

Chants, airs and dances for alto flute/alto recorder and live electronics.

Duration: 9:00.

First Performance: Schlossgalerie Steyr, Austria, 27/4/2008, Helge Stiegler, Subsequent Performances: Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music, Belfast, 25/8/2008, Carin Levine (alto flute). Bürgerspitalkirche, Waidhofen an der Ybbs, Austria, 19/9/2008, Helge Stiegler (alto recorder). Audiograft Festival, Modern Art, Oxford, 1/3/2013, Susanna Borsch (alto recorder).

Chants addresses the issue of musical structure from an alternative perspective, consisting of sending a source musical idea along a number of distinct paths with seemingly separate trajectories and characters. This concept is partly based on the structures found in Bach's organ Chorale Preludes and Chorale Variations. However, in this instance the aim is to run variants of the text in parallel with each other, and to intercut between them, rather than having them juxtaposed as texturally discrete entities or musical moments. Thus Chants interleaves three distinct types of music: the first consisting of long, timeless values, the second of flowing, rhythmically fluctuating, lyrical lines, and the third of fast, angular and jagged figures.

Over time, a process of elaboration and decoration of the material causes the differences amongst these types to dissolve and lines to fuse. Computer transformations texturally enrich the instrument's musical material in terms of rhythm, harmony and gesture. Live electronic transformations initially delineate the musical structures, in a similar way to the textural and motivic characterisation of separate variations on a given choral melody (and its harmonisation) in Bach's keyboard music. For instance, variants that are based on dance-like movements, canonic textures or voice with instrumental obbligato movements are paralleled by corresponding electronic counterparts: 'chant' material generates slow arpeggiations whose elements become progressively compressed in time and tessitura; 'airs' increase the harmonic density and rhythmic decoration of the line; and 'dance' material fluctuates between the type of 'consequent' responses elicited from the computer transformation - from bare reverberation to cascades of figuration. The work's dedicated MAX application uses harmonisers, delay-lines, feedback and ring modulation for enriching the instrument's harmonic material whilst rhythmic elaboration utilises granulation based on Clarke's fog~ object in conjunction with the other processing configurations [4].

[4] Clarke, M. and Rodet, X. IRCAM.