50NGW/0 (2012-22)
Date: 22 April 2022
Venue: Primrose Potter Salon of the Melbourne Recital Centre, Melbourne, Australia
Performers: Deborah Kayser, voice; Ryan Williams, Paetzold contrabass recorder in F (ELISION Ensemble)
The composition of this piece began in 2012 and was completed in 2022.
This piece aims to intensify being-with at the level of spectators’ consciousness by shaping their attention, most notably the sense of intention and expectation, especially towards something absent. Rather than forming these expectations through a tonic cadence or a resolution of a suspension, as in classical music, the idea is radicalised by letting the audience have a structured and stylised expectation of a conventionally musical sound to be produced in the first place.
To this end, a trajecory of increasing tension, analogous to a ‘harmonic progression’, is created. Factors required to produce the sonic proper by voice and contrabass-recorder are classified in terms of their necessary and sufficient conditions: being ready on stage, maintaining the correct posture, breathing in, forming the right embouchure, bringing one’s mouth close to the mouthpiece, blowing sufficient air into the tube, and placing fingers appropriately to press the key and modify the pitches etc. Generally, the closer these conditions come to being fulfilled, the higher the tension becomes.
Together, these elements form a logical structure that is both natural and artificial at the same time, exploiting some preexisting knowledge a normal concert-goer already has. It establishes the intentional-expectational trajectory towards the absent but mentally imagined goal of sound arising from voice and the contrabass recorder, which is in turn embedded in the broader organic logic and grammar of the work that also include aspects of gestalts of movement, such as bodily simulated rhythms in swinging trajectories, inaction, and the dance-associated triple meter.