Output details

Echoes Beneath the Moonlight's Star for flute, clarinet and live electronics. Duration: 10:00

First Performance: Salle d'orchestre, Cite de la musique et de la danse, Strasbourg, 10/1/2013, Adam Starkie (clarinet) Emiliano Gavito (flute)." Subsequent Performances: Contemporary Music Weekend, University of Leeds International Concert Series, 16/4/2013, Adam Starkie (clarinet) Emiliano Gavito (flute).

This work investigates the process by which an extra-musical metaphor is realised as a composition using acoustic and electronic means. The metaphor is drawn from Thomas Moore's poem Echo; the composition reflects the textural effect of echoes between the instruments themselves, and between the instruments and live electronics.

Beginning with compacted intertwined threads, the instrumental lines form progressively decorative and ornamental structures which in turn become, on the one hand, increasingly rhythmic and, on the other hand, frozen and static. At times the lines flow between the instruments (echo interference), whilst at others the two timbres work together to construct the musical textures and gestures,; drawing out collisions of melodies and melisma which move amongst raw, primitive, complex and elaborate sound-worlds through their interactions with the computer's real-time transformation of the musical material.

The live electronics component creates its textures according to two parallel and complementary processes, equivalent to the use of two related but distinct woodwind instrumental timbres. One process generates sustained, layered sounds by initially freezing certain pitches; unfolding the implicit harmony of the instrumental lines using large grain sizes and grain overlaps. This process is itself transformed: 1) by movement within the sustained sounds through granulation and gradual offset motion between chords and 2) by more extreme, rapid granulation employing shorter grain sizes which also colour the pitch content of the chords with noise. The second layer initially responds with frequency shifted, hence inharmonic or noise-based echoes of the instruments' phrases but then becomes more sustained in nature: the first moves from being responsive to held instrumental notes to gestures; the second moves from being responsive to gestures to transforming sustained events.

[1] The dedicated MAX application uses the iana~ (Tordoroff, T., E. Daubresse, F.Fineberg) and munger1~ objects (Bukvic, Kim, Trueman, Grill, 2007).