Daryl: And finally, DARK MATTER occupies a significant position in your output. How do you relate it to previous compositional cycles and works?

Richard: As I said before, it occupies a particular situation as part of the process towards inclusivity which has been going on in my work since the beginning. In fact, not just because of its duration, it attempts to encompass «more» than any previous single work I have produced, and not because I wanted to write some «encyclopaedic work of reference« but in order to speculate on connections and implications in a way that perhaps only musical forms can. And these connections do of course extend outwards from the borders of DARK MATTER itself: I could make a case for considering Vanity, Opening of the Mouth, Unter Wasser and DARK MATTER, to name only these four largest works, as themselves concentric stages in the evolution of something larger. It's also significant, at least to me, that DARK MATTER opens a relationship with the Cikada ensemble, which is the first European ensemble to have grasped the nettle, so to speak, in a comparable way to ELISION, as concerns engagement with my work on a level further than the commissioning of individual pieces. Ultimately I don't write individual pieces, however removable the elements of a cycle like this might be.

In the case of each of the large works I just mentioned, the form and its dimensions are also intimately related to the work's poetic identity. I was once asked why Opening of the Mouth was so much less «dense» than other music I had written. One might just as well ask why Beethoven's fifth symphony begins with those four notes, and not other ones, and not three or five. DARK MATTER does have a number of its own characteristic features: the electric guitar (and, by extension, the plucked sounds which also dominate much of the electronic material in the work), and its particular material which also permeates several of the ensemble components; the use of «symmetrical» (in the wider mathematical sense) forms such as canons and palindromes and recursively self-similar structures; the occasional appearance of «spectral» materials derived from the natural harmonic series; a general tendency towards high density (!) in the ensemble music; and so on. And all of these features are in fact not incidentally thrown together but unified at a deeper structural level, by a sort of general «theory» which can have many different manifestations. Here we come back to inclusivity again. I want to find a way of working with musical materials which would exclude as little as possible, while also enabling the resulting wide range of materials to be strongly related together in diverse (logical and illogical) ways. Although I don't mention this in order to congratulate myself; I don't think it is in the end an achievable goal, any more than are the goals of those scientists who think of themselves as being on the trail of an all-encompassing «theory of everything».

On the other hand, there are various large-scale structural parallels with Opening of the Mouth, which became apparent to me only when work on DARK MATTER was at an advanced stage. This feature might be telling me something interesting and/or useful about possible approaches to large forms of this kind. What that might be, I have as yet no idea.