drift of summer

 

 

drift of summer
for any/all of the following:
double bass (1)
percussion (2)
violin (3)

5'

 

drift of summer for amplified double bass(es) and percussionist(s)

I started writing these studies in 1995, to try to explore the balance between restriction and freedom within a composed musical work. All of the works in this ongoing series, of which versions for violin, double bass, percussion and woodwind have been completed, share the same title, which is taken from a painting by the abstract American artist Mark Tobey. The work attempts to match the varied textural surface of the painting. Each version of the work allows the performer different freedoms. In the versions presented here, both for up to six players, the score for the double bassist(s) gives detailed timbral, dynamic and gestural information while leaving the specific realisation and ordering of events up to the player(s). The percussion score gives detailed rhythmic and dynamic information whilst leaving the choice of instrumentation up to the player(s).

 

 

These studies set out to explore the role of freedom in performance. There are two main influences upon the writing of the piece, the first of which was the influence of free improvisation, witnessed in a number of live performances by people such as Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, Charles Hayward and John Zorn. Secondly, they were written after completing a number of acousmatic works and reflect a wish to bring experience gained from working electroacoustically to instrumental composition. Their designation as compositional studies also reveals a need to rethink, and as a result, to change certain ways of working through the writing of these pieces. Subsequently they can be seen as rather extreme pieces (particularly in comparison with my other instrumental pieces) which nevertheless have influenced all my subsequent writing.

The work which immediately predates these studies, TANK (which was written for a contemporary dance performance ) consists of four separate tapes, each containing a different type of sound, which are played concurrently from the four corners of the performance space. Each tape was made independently and is approximately twice as long as the performance. Although the tapes are started together at the start of the performance, they should not all be played from the beginning. The unsynchronised relationship between the tapes allows each performance to be different, and provides a flexible sound environment for the dance. The experience of rehearsing and seeing the work in performance, with its variable resulting sound world, led directly on to the drift of summer group of pieces and the aim of writing instrumentally to create similarly flexible results.
Although each piece in the series is written for a specific instrument or type of performer (e.g. percussionist), each of the pieces can be combined together with any of the others. Versions of the work range from solo realisations, through versions for multiple players of the same instrument, to performances using all the five available versions. In order to accommodate this flexibility of instrumentation, an overall time length for the piece was imposed (five minutes), as was an internal division of this duration (into ten second units). This temporal framework was created in order to allow some synchronisation between players (on a mid to large-scale) whilst allowing freedom within this, on a small scale. The absence of any large-scale articulated form in TANK (as a result of the temporal freedom between the tape material) is echoed in the repetitive structure of drift. At the start of each ten second unit all of the different parts are playing, gradually ceasing on one of the second divisions. The overall effect of this is of a repeated attack-decay gesture (every ten seconds), particularly with multiple instruments playing together.
Within this overall gestural framework each instrument is given a specific type of freedom: for the percussionist, a specific instrumentation is not specified, only the required number of different instruments (five); the double bass has detailed instructions regarding the timbral nature of the sound produced and its dynamic, but no information regarding pitch.
The avoidance of any pitch information in all of the versions of the piece shows a wish to rethink and reorganise compositional priorities. In earlier instrumental work there was a concern that pitch organisation was beginning to dominate my compositional method, so here I forced myself to work without notated pitch at all. This restriction particularly forced a rethinking of certain instruments, as can be seen in the double bass version, which is reinvented as the source of a wide variety of timbre.

The methods used to develop the material within the structural framework outlined above were deliberately kept simple and are mostly the result of the overlaying of two or three linear processes. Within the double bass version this consisted firstly of the creation of a catalogue of timbral resources and the devising of a notation for their representation. From this a thirteen step ‘scale’ was arrived at which moves timbrally from maximum noise content (hitting the body of the instrument) to maximum pitch content (arco, ord. bow position) and which is notated as follows:



bow noise -----------------------------------------------------------------------> ord.pitch

(An explanation of these symbols is given in the score of drift of summer1).

This scale is then subjected to a process whereby each element can either be replaced by one of its neighbours in the original scale or it can remain the same. This process was carried out repetitively, deforming the original scale to create fifteen different sequences (including the original scale, which can be seen on page 13 of the score). Each of these sequences forms the basis of a single page of the score.