Music for 16 percussionists from 1993.
These are measures 36 - 40 of what would later become the first verse of Poème récursif.
Recurrence generates this music. The textures work musically and play well. And I guess this surprised me somewhat then.
Less surprising, looking back now, composing these structures by hand and writing them with pencil, paper, pen and eraser made experimentation hard.
Instrumentation as a heuristic. This early verse of Poème récursif specifies instrumentation only approximately. You need 16 percussionists to perform the piece and you need untuned instruments in each part. And that's all. Why? Because I was concerned more with massiveness of texture here than anything else. So whether wood or metal or bones or skin attack these notes matters much less than the number of attacks that happen at once or than the number of attacks that happen soon after one another. Sustaining instruments are to be avoided and all attacks are supershort. So both these requirements help guide selection of instruments from one performance to the next.
Dynamics as a by-product. The the notes are all essentially staccatissimi — the score preface makes it clear that a half note and an eighth note differ not at all. And all notes are forte. Or all notes are piano. Either way. What matters is that notes all carry the same dynamic in a given performance. But note that the dynamic effect of different moments in time vary tremendously. All 16 parts mark the beginning of each measure clearly and insistently, for example, but what happens between the start of one measure and the start of the next varies considerably in terms of both density and energy overall. The number of attacks that happen at once or soon after one another that govern everything in this piece and successively build up or tear down moments of loudness or quiet. Dynamics and the impression of dynamics contribute crucially to the piece. But these are dynamics as a by-product. These are dynamics put out as the by-product of the much larger and more central process of massing attacks on top of one another over and over.
Divisions as color. I set the tempo of this early verse to quarter = 96. When it came time to recast this work as the first real verse of Poème récursif it was quite clear that the texture needed incredible amounts of space to breathe. And so the verses of the piece from 2003 and 2005 mark half note = 38 - 42. But the much faster tempo made sense years ago and so it stayed. The piece makes use of eight, and only eight, divisions of the whole note. Dividing the whole note into eight equal parts gives us a measure of eighth notes. Dividing the whole note into seven and six equal parts gives us septuplets and sextuplets. Measure-length whole note represent no division at all. These are divisions as color. Eight types of division arrayed in a palette. A bit from here, a bit from there. And what winds up mattering are the ways in which bits of color interact with at an instant and over the course of a measure. Simultaneous divisions into three and seven grit and rub against each other. Simultaneous divisions into two, four and eighth mutually reinforce. In the notation of the score, what's dividing here is either the whole note or measure. But these are both only notational tokens standing in for more perfect and imagined block of rhythmic time.
