alto/baritone saxophone and chamber ensemble (1.1.1.0;1.1.1.0;perc;pf;2.1.1.1)
Commissioned and premiered by Stroma, cond. Hamish McKeich (soloist: Lars Mlekusch)
This work is the second in a sequence of pieces that started with dirty pixels, pieces that focus on ideas of roughness and rawness, including a rather “overblown” quality to the writing. The impression is of a musical language struggling under the weight of its own plenitude, both as a reaction to the idea of having too much unified economy of material and as a way of incorporating my love of late-Romantic musical idioms into a context in which their mild cheesiness is made all the more pungent. Underlying every note in this work is a six-note collection (a “splinter”) gathered from the opening of the third movement of Kyburz’s Cells. Throughout this work there are many little “nods” to this seminal piece, as well as to the Schwarzer und Roter Tanz from Tutuguri by Wolfgang Rihm, a composer who seems to share my love of “over-the-topness”.
Score extract:
