Output details

Rotations and Resonances for amplified quartet, pre-composed tape, amplified piano resonances and interactive sound

Commissioned by the Rodewald Concert Society and premiered by The Smith Quartet, the primary research questions for this work were composing flexible concrete forms, referential quotation and composing with heterodyning frequencies.

I had recently taught sessions on the music of Elliott Carter and Steve Reich. Reich's music has a habit of influencing my compositional output, mostly on a subliminal level recognised only in retrospect. This quartet consciously refers to the music of gradual process from Reich's early minimalist years within a passage of rotation and repetition where the rhythm gradually alters to create a stream of pulsing melodic fragments, shifting-beats, contrapuntal rhythms and displaced accents (figs I-O). Whilst the rhythmic structure for this section refers to the music of Reich, the pitch-organisation for most of the piece refers to Carter’s all-triad hexachord: 0-1-2-4-7-8.

Alongside these two referential characteristics, this quartet continues my work with heterodyning frequencies. These theories are used to colour, dilute and abandon the pitch-content of the hexachord.

The concrete audio was composed around the acoustic score. All sounds were produced by a violin playing fragments from that score. A natural communication of aural cues and triggered responses evolved between the medium. The concrete audio is in six files. This is part of a series of works in which I have explored the possibilities of flexible concrete forms. Or in this case: flexible silences.

During performance, the concrete sounds can be used to stimulate ‘ghost-resonances’ from an amplified piano. I had planned to feed variable pitch-shifting, sub-bass frequencies into sub-bass speakers for concert performances, but in practice it took ages for the 'invisible' sub-bass sounds to heterodyne into 'audible' frequencies (combined and resultant tones) and almost destroyed the speakers in the process. Instead, I pre-recorded this acoustic phenomenon as part of the concrete sound (see score preface).