Last updated Fri Sep 10 01:53:10 2010. All content © 1996-2010 Christopher Ariza. All Rights Reserved.

comma

for large ensemble

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Description:
Or this is a work composed for five trios, a sort-of cubed pierrot ensemble. The instrumentation inspires the form: the work moves without pause between five sections, each morphing one into the other, yet each an isolated textural manifesto. A culmination of previous experiments in harmony, this work demonstrates a very free use of aggregate completing ordered content groups, a marriage of the textural freedom of functional harmony and the harmonic diversity of post-tonal and non-western theory. Or this is a new minimalism, a maximalist minimalism, a synthesis of the rhythmic and textural vocabulary of minimalism (along with a sympathy for the audience and popular musics) with the complexity, at all levels, so admired by the mid-century avant-garde. Or this is a work exploring the comma, the gap, either in the circle of fifths, in the caesura of a phrase, in the cycling of a polyrhythm or in the instrumental isolation of poly-texture. Or this is a work of tension, the tension of linearity, the tension of expectation. The tension between foreground and background, content and form. So-called melody dissolves into so-called harmony, as the music flips between so-called gesture and so-called process. Or this is a work offering more than a singular relationship with the listener.

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