Diverse Tremblings

2013

contrabass flute + fixed medium (stereo)

8’00”

Commissioned by:

Richard Craig (funded by Creative Scotland)

Awards:

Finalist, Musica Nova, Czech Republic, 2015

Diverse Tremblings takes Francis Bacon’s essay New Atlantis as its starting point. In this piece of writing from 1624, he describes a brave new world consisting of, amongst other things, Sound-Houses:

“…wher we practice and demonstrate all Sounds and their Generation”..

As a composer of electroacoustic music, I see the studio where I create my work as a kind of Sound-House, a research base where I can work with sounds, in this case, sounds produced by the relatively unknown contrabass flute.

Bacon goes on to describe what goes on in these Sound-Houses, including technological developments, some of which would not exist for another 300-350 years (including the telephone, hearing aid and complex digital signal processing techniques). Phrases from the essay are used as structuring elements, providing context for certain sections, such as Trunks and Pipes:

“Wee also have meanes to convey Sounds in Trunks and Pipes, in strange Lines and Distances.”

and the title of the piece itself:

“We make diverse tremblings and Warblings of Sounds”

which is here used as a term to describe all music and sound.

The instrument itself also provides contextual material for the piece. Both its apparent unwieldiness, due to its size and its tone production, often accompanied by a certain amount of noise from the passage of air across the mouthpiece aperture, provide opportunities to challenge and exploit these apparent inadequacies in musical terms.

The digital sound part is created from recordings made from the contrabass flute and acts as both a duo partner for the live player and an extension to the live instrument, both technically and spatially.