a new virtuosity
The body of the operator gives and receives. Even a machine like the lathe or the milling machine produces this particular sensation. There exists an entire sensorial array of tools of all kinds. Even the rarest carpenter’s tool like the “tarabiscot” has its very own array of sensations. One could continue like this almost indefinitely, moving more or less continuously to the sensation that artistic instruments give to those who play them: the touch of a piano, feeling the vibration and tension of the strings of a harp, the snapping of the strings of the hurdy-gurdy on the cylinder covered with rosin-- it’s a register that’s almost inexhaustible…
ON TECHNO-AESTHETICS
Gilbert Simondon
I am fortunate to work with some of the leading performers of new music in the US, something that has enabled and encouraged the often substantial technical challenges found in my music. This is found in many long-term partners (such as Ieva Jokubaviciute, Aelous Quartet, and others), but is perhaps most clearly heard in counter)induction, the ensemble I co-founded in 1998 as a collaboration between composers at the University of Pennsylvania and performers at the Juilliard School).
Beyond mastery of instrumental technique, my work interrogates an additional mode of musicking, the virtuosity of playing together. In works like these below, the notable physical demands on the performers are compounded by notable and playful disruptions. Through unavoidable chance and force disagreements to the pulse and beat, players and audiences are invited into the great anxiety of performance: the chance of collective failure, the possibility of a performance coming apart.
Tethys
Tethys is a peculiar figure in the mythic structure of her position in the mythic structures Antiquity; sister and consort of Oceanus, she reorders stars and constellations and gives birth to rivers and lakes as well as the sea nymphs. In Tethys the soloist couples and decouples from three distinct groupings of instruments, pushing and pulling harmonies and motives, but also forming connections that pull the music across the space of the performance. The work was written for violinist Miranda Cuckson, and counter)induction.
Etude “The Hunt by Night
Etude No. 3, Quire 7 is a modern caccia wherein the temporal orientations of the musicians are bundled and re-bundled, and roles shift from pursuer to pursued, from furious precision to savage confusion.
The work has two sources: Paulo Ucello's 1470 eponymous painting, and Mahon's poem of the same. Uccello plays with the symmetry and flatness, as the colorful images of a hunt filled with hunters, horses, dogs, horns, while Mahon's poetic exegesis transits back and forth: “Crazed no more by foetid /Bestial howls" the hunt is transformed, " horses to rocking-horses / Tamed and framed to courtly uses."
Stretto Perpetuo
Stretto Perpetuo follows the heroic tendency of the Modern, inherited from the Romantic but now more jagged and intense; the duo here is almost combative. The performers fly along plateaus of order and disorder with the speed of the nomadic war-machine with its twists and turns, violent acceleration, and endless motion.