Reaktionmaschine [2005]

for piccolo, violin, cello, percussion, and piano

duration :: 15’

First performance :: Ensemble SurPlus — June in Buffalo Festival (Buffalo, NY), 9 June 2005

Reaktionmaschine is derived from an earlier one-minute miniature for crotales entitled hyphen.  In hyphen, I make use of the extremely resonant sound of the crotales to infiltrate, recharacterize and thus appropriate the silence that surrounds the piece’s brief duration.  The music is very quiet throughout; but more importantly, there are large swaths of resonant silence in which harmonic detritus is left floating, redefining the lack of musical (notated, performative) activity as a primary locus of musical interest.

In Reaktionmaschine, the components of hyphen are dissected, “orchestrated” for the larger ensemble, and spread throughout the timespan of the work according to a scheme of layered proportional strata that infiltrates every temporal aspect of the music.  And while there is no literal attempt to recreate the sheer sound of the originary work, the soundworld of the piece (with the strongest, most secure and most active sonic vocabulary at the top of the spectrum, becoming softer, more fragile, and less stable in the lower registers) is a direct response to the lopsided sonic profile of the crotales as a solo instrument.  The silences of hyphen are reinterpreted both as detached events in their own right (witness the one-minute-long, scarcely active – but extremely intricately notated – cello solo a bit less than halfway through the second movement) and as pervasive sonic and gestural influences, giving the resulting larger-scale work a spare, fragile, continuously flickering presence.