Output details

permutazioni / a caso - for amplified ensemble

Première: 7 November 2009, RepertorioZero, Tonhalle, Zürich, Tage für Neue Musik (commission: Stadt Zürich).

This was the first in a series of notated works (with ‘misguided’ and ‘surface/tension’), three radically different solutions to the same initial challenge of using computer-assisted compositional techniques to help solve the fundamental research problem of how to enable the proliferation of diverse complex surface materials, whilst maintaining an underlying formal coherence. In this case, IRCAM’s OpenMusic was used to generate non-octavating scales, metrical permutations and rhythmical subdivisions, ‘out of time’ (Xenakis) structures from which short rapid gestures, poly-rhythmic layers and relatively static inharmonic spectra were derived, giving the piece both surface variety and an overall sonic consistency. As the tempo increases, so does the likelihood of OM-generated rhythmical subdivisions of the metrical structures, increasing the activity as the piece progresses. The ensemble is conceived as a collective where all instruments are of equal importance, although smaller subgroups are often called upon, especially the pairings of the two violins, viola/cello and e-piano/e-guitar. The percussion is the exception, its role being to articulate background rhythmical structures against which subtler, more transient surface events can occur. At times, energetic quasi-soloistic passages emerge from the denser textures, especially in the percussion, e-piano and e-guitar. However, such events are momentary and subordinate to the articulation of the overall formal idea of endless permutation and relatively invariant sonic totality, the underlying and unresolved tension that characterises the piece. There is an intentional dialectic between tempered chromatic and ‘natural’ harmonic microtonal structures, a contradiction implicit within the instrumentation itself. In this case, partly as an effect of the instrumentation, sounds intentionally referential of traditions of ‘free’ improvisation and electric jazz-rock of the 1970s combine with avant-gardist traditions of stochastic music, spectralism and ‘new-complexity’: it is this synthesis that defines the piece’s originality.