Music

Notes to the music as presented in Brisbane 2001

The Empire of Lights

for 9 instruments

transmission I

for electric guitar

khasma

for string quintet and electronics

transmission II

for electric guitar and electronics

De vita coelitus comparanda

for soprano and 7 instruments

transmission III

for electric guitar

Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae

for contrabass clarinet and 12 instruments
(containing interference for solo contrabass clarinet and transmission IV for electric guitar and electronics)

transmission V

for electric guitar

Katasterismoi

electronic music

stirrings

for 9 instruments
(with the text Sounds by Samuel Beckett, by kind permission of the Samuel Beckett Estate and Calder Publications)

transmission VI

for electric guitar and electronics

Before going any further, I should try to emphasise that the following comments on the music and its conception, while (perhaps) interesting in themselves and (I hope) not wildly unrelated to the listening experience, are not intended as some kind of spin-doctoring regarding what you «ought» to think the music is doing.

DARK MATTER stands for that which is unknown and possibly unknowable, despite the age-old and continuing attempt to search outwards to an understanding of the cosmos and inward to an understanding of human consciousness, and perhaps even further towards some idea of what these might have in common. During the evolution of the universe, a particular structure has emerged (the human mind, and perhaps others) which can somehow assimilate and encapsulate «knowledge» about the rest, whatever any of those things might be. This is a very deep mystery, I think, and is maybe the central motivation for DARK MATTER. I view composition (and, by extension, performance and listening also) as a means to explore the «structure of the imagination» and perhaps to discover something about its nature, in a way which might be inaccessible to scientific method, however admirable one might find the latter's intellectual rigour and its impressive results. In other words, could one possibly perceive unsuspected truths hidden in the complex web of ideas, associations, evolutions and soundforms which are the substructure of such a work? And that substructure must in a sense be a physical thing, it must be a physical substructure of the mind which produced it . . .  and what does that mean? And could all of this be rendered communicable through the medium of music? Unlikely, would be a reasonable answer. Should we be concerned with what is reasonable? Is it not possible that even such a quixotic project might at least give access to musical results which might not have been possible otherwise? Is this the real subject at hand?

The various component pieces of DARK MATTER display a number of common characteristics which run like thematic strands through the work. For example, most consist of six formal divisions, a feature whose ancestry can be traced ultimately to the six strings of the guitar. This is the principal solo instrument in the cycle, as can be seen above. The material of transmission is based on six strands of pitch-material (one centred on each string) which also appear more or less recognisably in other contexts; for example stirrings consists of reworkings of each of these strands in turn (in its six movements), and the acoustic guitar in De vita coelitus comparanda develops the same material in its own idiomatic way, while at the same time it is constantly being taken up and reshaped by the three clarinettists.

Other examples of recurrent motives are: formal repetition; symmetrical structures including canons and palindromes; processes of augmentation and diminution applied to intervals as well as durations, and so on. The «compulsion to symmetry» is of course something which the music has in common with almost all scientific (and pre-scientific) theorising, up to the present day and no doubt into at least the forseeable future, notwithstanding the fact that «underlying symmetries» don't always present themselves clearly to the eye (or ear) but are more often obscured or distorted by «noise» in its various manifestations. But perhaps the noise is in the end is what is fundamental.

I have been working on DARK MATTER for some years and was always intending that it should carry an overall dedication to Iannis XENAKIS; I mention this in order to emphasise that this dedication is in no way a memorial to someone sadly lost to us, but a tribute to the living composer.

--Richard BARRETT