a piece of twine
for saxophone quartet (SATB).
2000 4' 2pp
first performance: Saxploitation, Spitalfields Festival, London.

 

click to play (442k mp3)
 

 

 

 

a piece of twine was made as an arrangement of material from twine, reworked for a standard saxophone quartet. This short piece, which contains only two brief sections of new material (at rehearsal figures E and F), modifies the earlier piece, mainly through transposition. The earlier piece’s concern with high and low are continued here in a slightly modified form, particularly in these new sections where unspecified very high and very low notes are notated. Unlike the ensemble for twine, which consists of the same instrument with the same transposition, a standard saxophone quartet contains four different instruments each with its own transposition. This factor is used to modify directly the material from the earlier piece in various ways, particularly around the idea of unisons, both written and played. As an example, at bar 7 the ensemble plays in (near) unison, whilst at the conclusion of this material, at bar 13, it is written as a unison, generating the chord as shown here: