My recent piece, "Boxes," belongs to a collection of pieces under the name “Acoustics of Everyday,” focused on explicit issues related to classical acoustics: resonance boxes, strings, mutes, filters, microtonality, and other subjects to come.
I had a wonderful adventure with Ensemble Modelo62, which included three concerts, a recording session, and shared rehearsal time. In all those instances, I could deepen my questions about this new chapter in my music.
"Boxes" is mainly focused on the subject of space. Different resonance boxes are in dialogue with each other, and also with the big box around them, which is the room itself.
In a series of concentric layers, my first concern about space starts with the very architecture of the piece.
How?
- Composing different spaces within the piece by grouping instruments by color and/or behavior (orchestration).
- Establishing the role of the instruments (solo, tutti, ensemble).
- Composing their interaction in a combo of music and space (soloist, duplications, hoquetus, etc.).
- "Boxes" asks what is sounding, when, and where at the same time.
Establishing musical behavior in terms of time and also space: repeated notes "freeze time", while endlessly looping scales "move time in circles"; repeated notes played by one instrument "freeze space," while the hoquetus form "opens it up".
Posing the question of what sounds inside or outside the boxes.
The physical handles and metal components of the stage boxes reacted to certain frequencies from the guitar amps which were located inside... so, the boxes themselves sang on stage, becoming more than just resonance containers but producing sound!
Music, as a holistic unity, brings together different purposes, perspectives, and a multiplicity of diverse energies into one and only one perceptual experience, melting the experience into one single logic.
Space is experienced as an unconscious unity rather than as a collection of recognizably separable processes.
Spaces speak, are you listening? B. Blesser and L.R. Salter
Post-concert questions.
- How concrete is the space of the piece in terms of composition? And how is the dialogue with the architectonic space of the concert hall?
- How aware are the listeners of space? Is it possible to design a space that is moving instead of sound events traveling in it? Therefore: how to differentiate the movement of the events rather than the movement of the space itself?
- How much should be seen? The visual aspect of a concert is always very influential. In previous works, I used the visual aspects of a concert as part of the music (music to see). But in Boxes, on the other hand, I was longing for a concert hall in the shadows.
To be continued.