I am interested in building near-static sound fields made up of repeated patterns, sustained tones, and what can be called islands of sound: brief sound events surrounded by silence. The two works Sonare and Celare pursue these interests through opposing approaches: the first one unfolds through repetitions of fast, loud, dissonant patterns, at times evoking the sound world of a swarm of wasps while the second one is a gentle and sparse environment in which simple, transparent harmonies resonate at a hazy intersection of early European and Turkish modal music.
Sonare was composed through close and rigorous collaboration with JACK Quartet. At first, the quartet interpreted and recorded notation containing the initial sketches of a few repeated patterns. Using audio software, I spliced these recordings into tiny fragments, and treated them as source material to create a countless variety of new patterns. I then transcribed these into notation for JACK Quartet to play and record once more. The final score is the result of many repetitions of this process of back-and-forth between audio and notation.
While Sonare places noise on a rhythmic grid to form a series of quasi-mechanical patterns, Celare is concerned with the clarity and precision of tones, positioned within an unmeasured, fluid temporal framework. Played mezza di voce, (the baroque style of gently fading into and out of each bowed note) the sonorities in the opening of Celare are informed by early string quartet music, most notably, Sonata a quattro No. 4 by Alessandro Scarlatti. I wanted to create a similarly pristine sound world in the context of just intonation, one that would also allow for dissonance. While experimenting with such sonorities, I stumbled upon melodic fragments of Turkish modes. These relics of monophonic music take on a new guise as the building blocks for the unhurried progression of dense sustained chords at the center of the work.
Written during 2015-16, these works have been heard across the USA and Europe, including performances at the NY Phil Biennial, Elbphilharmonie, and Lucerne Festival.
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