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Codex V (2007)
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12 or more players of any instrument
The model for codex V (and the other pieces which share the codex title, eight so far) was the situation where a fragmentary or skeletal or barely decipherable musical text, from the distant past, is realised by (contemporary) musicians so as to reconstruct, or imagine, something of the “living tradition” from which these few obscure fragments are perhaps the only musical remains. In codex V, a highly systematically-constructed “solo” line, which runs throughout the piece but is never actually played as such, is elaborated (“accompanied”?) in various more or less improvisatory ways by three mixed (but otherwise unspecified) groups of instruments.
Codex V was completed in 2007, commissioned by CoMA, and is dedicated to Gregory Rose, who, in case this is of interest, conducted the very first public performance of a composition of mine, in December 1980.