Straight Line Through A Landscape (2022)
Details
Description: Chamber ensemble
Duration: 20'
Instrumentation: fl. cl. vc. perc: 4 demijohns, connected by siphons. Medium hard sticks, soft sticks, ball bearings.
Commission: Commission by the London Symphony Orchestra's Discovery programme
First performance: LSO St. Luke's, London, 15th June, 2022
Score link
Recording: Live video
Programme Note
In the ‘straight line mission,’ YouTuber Thomas George Davies attempts to cross a country in a straight line. Guided by GPS, he follows his pre-planned route, no matter the hedgerows, rivers, or angry farmers that bar his way. Beyond their entertainment value, these videos reveal much about a modern landscape: how nature collides with digital logic, how laws and customs rebuff an abstract line on a map.
This reminded me of tuning theory, which is full of numbers representing frequency ratios. As a good theorist, you make the numbers dance, creating wonderful chords arrayed on a page. But these are refigured by reality: our instruments, our ears, and our muscle memories have their own ideas about which tunings have significance, and which are merely inflections.
In this piece, glissandos act as straight lines through a tuned landscape. It was important that this line be inevitable and self-willed, but an electronic sonority felt wrong. Instead, we witness the inevitability of a physical process: siphons connect four glass vessels, retuning them as they move. To me, it is ceremonial, a procession through pitch space in which four musicians animate the machinery of gravity, water, and glass.
Description: Chamber ensemble
Duration: 20'
Instrumentation: fl. cl. vc. perc: 4 demijohns, connected by siphons. Medium hard sticks, soft sticks, ball bearings.
Commission: Commission by the London Symphony Orchestra's Discovery programme
First performance: LSO St. Luke's, London, 15th June, 2022
Score link
Recording: Live video
Programme Note
In the ‘straight line mission,’ YouTuber Thomas George Davies attempts to cross a country in a straight line. Guided by GPS, he follows his pre-planned route, no matter the hedgerows, rivers, or angry farmers that bar his way. Beyond their entertainment value, these videos reveal much about a modern landscape: how nature collides with digital logic, how laws and customs rebuff an abstract line on a map.
This reminded me of tuning theory, which is full of numbers representing frequency ratios. As a good theorist, you make the numbers dance, creating wonderful chords arrayed on a page. But these are refigured by reality: our instruments, our ears, and our muscle memories have their own ideas about which tunings have significance, and which are merely inflections.
In this piece, glissandos act as straight lines through a tuned landscape. It was important that this line be inevitable and self-willed, but an electronic sonority felt wrong. Instead, we witness the inevitability of a physical process: siphons connect four glass vessels, retuning them as they move. To me, it is ceremonial, a procession through pitch space in which four musicians animate the machinery of gravity, water, and glass.