Output details

Dioscuri – Six Preludes for Two Cellos

First performed by Pei-Jei and Pei-Sian Ng, Mecklenberg Festival, Germany , 15 July 2010.

Recording: http://soundcloud.com/gary-carpenter/sets/dioscuri

Dioscuri was written at the request of the duo, Pei-Jei and Pei-Sian Ng (the ‘Twin ‘Cellists’). The mythical twin brothers Castor and Pollux are collectively known in Greek as the Dioscuri. It requires one cello to tune down a semitone, and explores the idea of two players who are twins playing identical notes but emitting different pitches, or conversely playing different notes to get identical pitches. The work also explores the timbral richness that retuning would bring to the open strings and natural harmonics.

Since participating in an intensive residential course with John Cage and Merce Cunningham in the early 1980s, Carpenter has been fascinated by chance systems. The pitches in this piece are derived from numbers generated by Carpenter’s local National Lottery terminal, hence the title of the first Prelude, ‘It Could be You’. The numbers 1 to 49 were assigned to the chromatic pitches. Carpenter then bought two ‘Lucky Dip’ (random number generated) lottery tickets with 6 lines on each (there are 6 numbers to a line) and assigned the pitches from these numbers (6 is a suitably Cageian number). A statistically improbable appearance of the numbers 1, 12, 13, 24, 25 36, 37, 48 and 49, which correspond to the notes C and B (H in German) proved serendipitous.

Each Prelude is in itself abstract. The titles, which refer to mirrors, quality, memory, or the myth of Castor and Pollux - in particular, St Elmo’s Fire (in nos 2 and 3] - were appended after completing all six as an oblique homage to Debussy. Like Debussy’s Preludes the titles appear after the last bar in the score.