“In ceramics, a cracked glaze can occur during the firing process, when intense heat creates fractures and imperfections, resulting in a beautiful tension between a smooth form and a tarnished surface. The title is a reference to the barstglazuur/cracked glaze collection in the Kunst Museum Den Haag that I have been lucky enough to visit many times, most recently whilst a guest teacher at The Royal Conservatory The Hague in the summer of 2023.
In my recent music, I’m constantly fascinated by how notation, improvisation and technology collide and ‘crack’ each other to produce catalytic results. With this new work for Ensemble Klang, my own ensemble Spheric Totemic and the incredible vocalist Sofia Jernberg, there is the chance to experience that cracking process over an expanded time frame of 50 minutes.
At the level of musical notation, this piece is built around one long, descending scale that takes nineteen minutes to unfurl, before being repeated with some variations. All around this, the surface texture is built from ‘fermentation forms’: short, simple musical ideas of differing lengths played by keyboards and brass that when superimposed create a shimmering complexity. The score has deliberate holes at the vertical and horizontal level, moments where the music can only be completed by improvisation or technological intervention.
At the improvisational level, the virtuoso musicians of Spheric Totemic and Sofia Jernberg bring decades of collective intuitive experience to the unfolding form, their musical languages bringing a catalytic antidote to the notation, throwing the music into a different direction and nodding to influences beyond the concert hall; to club culture, to sound art, to jazz and to beyond Europe. At the technological level, the signals of the musicians are splintered by realtime sampling and spatialisation, throwing the music across the stereo field and altering the perception of time passing. The overall impact, I hope, is of a dynamic tension, a stasis in which all kinds of splintering and cracking is perceivable.
My huge thanks to Sofia Jernberg, the musicians of Spheric Totemic (Alexander Hawkins, Neil Charles, Stephen Davis and Mandhira de Saram) and the incredible Ensemble Klang, who have supported my music for nearly two decades.”
For more info on Sofia Jernberg…
For more info on Spheric Totemic…
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