Output details

Release : for symphony orchestra

Commissioned by the BBC for Tectonics Glasgow festival of experimental music

First Performance: BBC SSO / Ilan Volkov; City Halls, Glasgow, 12/05/13

Broadcast BBCR3, 01/06/13

The processes of electronic music have long been models for composers of acoustic music. The multifarious possibilities of live transformation offered by simple plug-in software effects and/or bespoke programmed units offer further extensions in the conceptualization of musical continuity, in which an electronically generated response may acquire greater import than the impulse on which it operates. In a related domain, Alvin Lucier’s experiments with the natural resonances of rooms are well known. 'Release seeks' to re-imagine the orchestra as a fantastical resonating chamber – or an effects patch that constantly rewrites itself – in which the release components of sounds are vastly extended and take on a life of their own.

In 'Release' I sought to develop further the microtonal language utilized in 'To See the Dark Between', 'Candlebird', and 'storm, rose, tiger'. While in these pieces microtonal pitch structures were derived from the 16th partial and lower in the harmonic series, 'Release' extends this to the 47th. The microtonal complexes in the earlier pieces are confined to a single series at any one time; 'Release' explores the possibility of superimposing multiple series. In the earlier pieces, the 24-tET environment is presented as a ‘different world’; 'Release' seeks to integrate and juxtapose microtonal and non-microtonal music: initially, a conspicuously diatonic attack is extended by a microtonal release; the situation is reversed in the final section.

This interest in combining microtonal and non-microtonal worlds led to a search for harmonic procedures that would be effective in both environments. All three large sections of Release function by repeatedly recontextualizing a focal pitch in progressively more consonant fields.