Unterwassermusik

I imagined the not-yet-built GES-2 space, thinking of it as a kind of pool filled with water — or fog — or some substance that refracts sound the way water refracts light.

The commission required the musicians to be distributed across the vast volume of the central nave. Which meant the music had to work without a conductor. And without complex synchronization like a MIDI click, as I decided immediately. That pulls the ground from under your feet. A composer normally thinks in terms of instantaneous interaction between sonic objects and performers. In contemporary music, an ensemble of eight rarely plays without a conductor — but here not only was no conductor foreseen, the musicians were not supposed to see each other, and possibly not even hear each other.

So I had to invent a material that could sustain the indeterminacy and variability of local interaction. In other words, it couldn't matter in any fundamental way whether two or five seconds had passed between any two events. The solution was that everyone plays from synchronized stopwatches; in the score, each line spans thirty seconds, and the notation inside is graphic — neither metric nor counted. There is no full score; if all the parts were stacked vertically one would emerge, but I chose not to do that. The two pianists share a single part, written so that they diverge both in timing and in the actual notes — making it playable with one piano or two.