Composer: Trevor Bača
Forces: fourteen instruments
Duration: 5 - 6 minutes
Zeit explores layered polyrhythms, a block-like distribution of textural material, stable drones, pitch rotation and registral fixation. All rhythmic material, on both the local or gestural level and also the global or sectional level derive from the single wing of a dragonfly. The various textures build under methods of iteration and circulation derived from natural models.
Instrumentation:
- flute
- oboe
- bass clarinet
- bassoon
- horn
- trumpet
- trombone
- piano
- harp
- violins 1 & 2
- viola
- cello
- bass
No percussion, no electronics, no instrument changes.
* * *
The process — color. Zeit began with the composition of instrumental color. Some colors warranted a description in words and almost all earned a picture. Small sketches with up and down lines and changes in articulation and inflection pencilled in along the way. All numbered and collected into the chapters of a book.
Parts of chapter 10. Unaccompanied violin.
Parts of chapter 17. Harp and piano.
Forty-two chapters total built over a period of months.
* * *
The process — time. Dragonflies shine and blur and cut curved paths in the Texas sun. Eyes and bodies flashing, and wings a marvel of reflected light. And it is from one such shining wing that the rhythms in Zeit all explicitly derive.
This is what happens when you color copy the wing of a dragonfly and blow it up by a factor of 7 or 8.
What starts out as a shining jewel flattens and fills just the center of the page.
Color copies fill bigger paper.
Pen and ink trace vertices in the wing.
And then vertices and the cell walls together.
Somewhere along the way we move from a shiny physical thing to a model. Compression, copy, ink and reproduction. And our model preserves the connections between things at the expense of shining colors and the calligraphic thicks and thins of edges.
At some point rhythms like these would appear:
Read the black and white model of the wing as a type of graph. Take cell walls equal to the set of graph edges and cell corners equal to the set of graph vertices. And then direct the edges of the graph relative to the body of the dragonfly. The different chitinous extensions from body to wingtip become rhythmic voices we read in parallel. Cell vertices become rhythmic attackpoints and the horizontal lengths of segments of cell wall between successive vertices become the temporal durations between successive events. And then read the vertical communication of segments of cell wall as indicators of simultaneity to show us when and where we are to take two different vertices, or attackpoints, at once.
So we read some small part of the natural world in two ways at once — horizontal segments of cell wall give us measured spatiotemporal distances whereas vertical segments of cell wall serve only as indicators of coordination or conjunction. This double reading means, first, that, as a practical consideration, distances in the vertical direction don't matter and, second, that the structure as a whole stretches shorter distances and shortens longer ones. Our collected series of timepoints constitute a lossy representation of our source.
* * *
Zeit was written between May 1997 and May 1998. The piece has yet to premiere. Interested ensembles should contact the composer directly for scores and parts.
