Output details

Diverse Tremblings : composition for contrabass flute and digital sound

Diverse Tremblings, for contrabass flute and digital sound, takes as its starting point Francis Bacon’s essay New Atlantis, where he describes an ideal world consisting of, amongst other things, Sound-Houses “wher we practice and demonstrate all Sounds and their Generation”.

As a composer of electroacoustic music, I see the studio where I create my work as a kind of Sound-House, a research base where I can work with sounds, in this case, sounds produced by the relatively unknown contrabass flute.

Bacon goes on to describe what goes on in these Sound-Houses, including technological developments, some of which would not exist for another 300-350 years (telephone, hearing aid, complex digital signal processing techniques). Phrases from the essay are used as structuring elements throughout the piece, providing context for certain sections, such as Trunks and Pipes (“Wee also have meanes to convey Sounds in Trunks and Pipes, in strange Lines and Distances”) and the title of the piece itself (“We make diverse tremblings and Warblings of Sounds”) which perhaps describes all music and sound.

The instrument itself provides contextual material for the piece. Its unwieldiness, due to its size and its tone production, often accompanied by a certain amount of noise from the passage of air across the mouthpiece aperture, both provide opportunities to challenge and exploit these “musical inadequacies”.

The digital sound part is created from recordings made from the contrabass flute and acts as both a duo partner for the live player and an extension to the live instrument, technically and spatially.

Diverse Tremblings was commissioned by Richard Craig, with funds from Creative Scotland, and was premiered by him as part of surroundsound in May 2013. The digital sound part was composed in the studios of the University of Aberdeen