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Anatomy (1985-86) |
1.ca.bcl.1/1000/1perc/str 11111 (all amplified) - 7'
Anatomy, completed in the spring of 1986, was first performed in the Darmstadt courses of that year by Ensemble Modern, conducted by Bernhard Kontarsky. It is the first in a series of eleven compositions collectively entitled Fictions, which was finally completed with Ruin for eighteen instruments in 1995. I think enough time has passed, since Anatomy was written, for it to seem in retrospect like a first, tentative but decisive, step towards a realisation of many of the compositional concerns which have pervaded my work in the succeeding years: for example, a concentration on physical, concrete sound material as cause rather than effect, and the beginnings of an 'anatomical' view of instrumental practice where instruments become heterogeneous fields of possibility rather than machines for making notes.
At the head of the score stands a quotation from Beckett's How It Is: "o the wish to be a little less wretched a little less the wish for a little beauty no when the panting stops I hear nothing of the kind that's not how I'm told this time". At that time it seemed like an opposite pointer at the poetic intentions of a particular composition. Eleven years later it seems to me more like an announcement that henceforth this would be the axiomatic point of reference for my further work.
© Richard Barrett, Amsterdam 9 October 1997