Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae

«the great art of light and darkness»

 . . .  is the title of a work on optics and the phases of the moon (but also touching on occult matters) published in 1671 by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius KIRCHER. The music is «unfolded» from the solo composition interference, whose title in turn refers to the patterns of light and darkness produced by interacting beams of radiation or subatomic particles, as in the famous «two-slit experiment». This experiment, simple and straightforward in itself, nevertheless throws up deep and unresolved implications for the nature of physical reality, leading as it does to the mysterious and (presently?) unanswerable question of what is «really happening» at the quantum level of space and time, and indeed of whether the idea of something «really happening» has any fundamental meaning at all.

Such ideas permeate the structure of the composition in various ways. It is also in another sense a work of speculation, in that the contrabass clarinet is itself a relatively «unknown» instrument, especially in a solo context, despite the remarkable but isolated contributions of such players as Anthony BRAXTON and Peter van BERGEN. Much of the material evolved out of extensive consultations with Carl ROSMAN, some of whose other abilities suggested the «prosthetic» extension of the instrument using the player's voice (with a range of four and a half octaves) and a pedal bass drum. Central to my intentions was to discover or develop a «virtuosity» inherent to the instrument, and then extrapolate it to an almost (?) absurd extreme.

Around all this is placed an ensemble consisting mostly of pairs of instruments, which in general alternate between polyphonic elaboration of the solo part and a harmonic function akin to a «continuo» group, in which the (electronically simulated) chamber organ plays an important role. For example, the opening vocal solo, accompanied by organ and percussion, is succeeded by a dense canon (using the durational proportions 2:3:4:5:6:10:15:30) whose strands rotate and eclipse each other like the elements of a mechanical solar system. At the centre of the work (and that of DARK MATTER) is a high point of chaos in which the soloist's material, interleaved with improvisation, is confronted by the fourth movement of transmission, itself partly improvisatory, in an extended passage whose «repetition» then recombines (partly) the same notated materials with (inevitably) different improvisatory inserts. The contrabass clarinet part in this section is in fact itself derived from the guitar «fabric».

With this exception, and in distinction to most of the compositions in which I have expanded a solo into a «concertante» composition, all of the ensemble music is derived from the same underlying materials as the solo, in other words not creating a dialectical relationship between the two layers, but one in which the ensemble generally takes one or more «alternative» pathways which that material «might» have taken, a feature which has its source once more in a contemplation of quantum-mechanical conundrums.

The Latin text of the vocal part is from Lucretius' encyclopaedic poem De rerum natura («On the nature of things»), and described the sudden and violent destruction of the world, though under what circumstances and for what reasons is unclear, since the crucial lines before the chosen fragment have ben lost  . . .