Output details

Axon

This is the most recent addition to a growing series of inter-linked works in which scientific ideas both inspire and generate compositional procedures. ‘The Lovelace Trilogy’ (Output 2) examined human form, both externally (Ada as subject) and internally (neurology and the brain as object), and led to the conception of a multifaceted ‘oxymoronic’ structure for Axon. Simultaneously directed and circular, the structure functions as an abstractly programmatic journey through one single neuron, and also as part of a neural network. Formally, it is both traditional and progressive: the hypothetical journey through the neuron (input – axon – output) equates to ABA’ form, whilst Axon’s structure also functions as a sequence of memories of the same few events coexisting in temporally widely-distorted versions, strictly controlled by an exponential functions over the entire work, but appearing more freely at local level. Two chords derived from Mesmerism (2011) representing cell body (self) are treated statically throughout Axon. This is contrasted with found (foreign) sources each of which goes some way towards expressing the line: ‘And neurocratic hope’ (Hill, 'Clavics'); from these sources various pitch and rhythmic archetypes are extracted. This ‘foreign’ data enters the cell body and is passed down the imaginary axon where ‘magnetic’ properties, hypothetically developed in Magnetite (2007), have been translated into electronic impulses, realised in the form of sequences of microtonally-inflected pitches strictly controlled as though by electric dipole moment between alternately positive and negative charges. Both ‘self’ and ‘foreign’ data submit to this treatment (with self at a much slower rate). A more aggressive, ‘sensuously austere’ (‘Ax-on’) character coexists with the more passive ‘austerely sensuous’, and throughout, there are multiple manifestations of each musical/neuronal meme along this spectrum that occur simultaneously.

Commissioned by BBC Radio 3. Première: 1 November 2013, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, BBC Philharmonic, conductor Juanjo Mena (live broadcast).