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There’s something very exciting to me about large-scale musical processes: slowly watching something unfold where, even if you know where it inevitably will end up, the gradual transformation can be fascinating, still full of surprising twists and turns. In some sense, this piece is just one big “process” (kind of like life itself?), but we complicate the process by struggling against it.
As the piece plays out, the musicians all progressively move through several “stages” of their musical lives, gradually rising through their range from dark heavy music to flickering, luminous sounds,floating up into the sky. The conductor can choose to bring individual musicians back temporarily by offering “food” (through pointing at them), which gives them more time, cycling through the process again. Different players have different randomly determined “lifespans”; for some, “food” is so effective that it sends them back to the beginning; for others it has less of an effect. However, they inevitably keep moving up, up, and up–and once they pass a certain point, they disappear into the air, their sound turning into pitchless breaths for the rest of the piece. The conductor’s “food” can no longer reach them.
In this piece I am interested in both the psychological puzzle (who will the conductor “save”? how long will they be able to keep various musicians “alive”?) as well as the sonic outcome, where players float into a sonic sky at different rates, some getting pulled back from the brink by the conductor, before inevitably disappearing into the air.
Are the musicians who fade into the air “dead”? They certainly disappear under the chaos of the living frantically calling out for food. However, once the piece progresses enough and most of the musicians fade into the sky, we can start to hear the “dead” as a collective texture of oscillating swells. When the final musician joins them, the piece concludes with the pitchless textures of the “dead” unifying into collective breaths. Perhaps, through this process we have transformed from many separate individuals into one conjoined organism – one very much still alive.
Specific instrumentation details are on the second page of the score.
For additional information, questions, or parts requests, contact Aidan.