Output details

'Knotted Tongues' for orchestra

The formal design of Knotted Tongues seeks to progress via musical 'states' or blocks that rupture, rather than by organic, motivically-related development. This work forms a link in a latent cycle of pieces, contemplating the idea of physical malfunction or breakdown, in this case speech dysfunction (stammering) as a basis for design.

Using ideas from biology (e.g. mutation, low fidelity copying, and emergent properties that evolve when systems interact in unpredicted ways) algorithmic and self-referential procedures were incorporated into the work’s composition, radically redefining my approach to issues of formal organisation.

The goal in rejecting the usual model of large-scale compositional construction (based on repetition, development, balance and polarity) was to include ideas more often associated with science (as well as music). Ideas propounded by Douglas Hofstadter (feedback loops), Daniel D. Dennett (self-organisation) and by Jonathan Kramer (specifically multivalent formal structures) greatly focussed and directed the development in this work. By devising principally cellular musical material allowing for multifaceted ways of combination (including mutational forms) musical states expand and establish. The next step was to allow the debris of exhausted states to form or allow a subsequent state to arise.

During the compositional act, assonance became preferable to repetition of material. Foreground material gradually became more combative against dense note saturations subsequently becoming further tangled and ensnared. Phrases energetically propel themselves forward, but are subsequently stymied, halted or caught in loops of repetition. Post-performance revisions facilitated further elongation, therefore heightening tension in sections of the work. The final piece fuses formalistic qualities in its organisation from scientific and biological thought with a halting, anxious air borne of 'the anticipation of the glottal catastrophe'.

Knotted Tongues was a Seattle Symphony Orchestra commission conducted by Ludovic Morlot. It will receive a performance in 2014 in China at the Beijing Modern Music Festival.