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Khasma (1999-2001) |
Khasma for string quintet and electronics was commissioned by Cikada and completed in early 2001; it is dedicated to Christian Eggen.
The title derives from a passage in Hesiod’s Theogony describing the stormy gulf (casma) far below the earth where the roots of the earth, heavens and Tartarus are situated, along with the “dreadful halls of gloomy Night”: writing at a time when Greek cosmology was about to emerge from myth-ridden confusion into proto-scientific speculation, he dimly anticipates the later philosophical contemplation of chaos and the indefinite or infinite (apeiron) by Anaximander and his successors.
Like most of the component compositions of DARK MATTER (1990-2001) for ensemble, electronics and installation, khasma consists of six sections - in this case, six for the quintet and six for the electronic sounds, which overlay and interpenetrate one another in microcosmic reflection of the large-scale interlocking construction of DARK MATTER. (In a complete performance, khasma is occasionally augmented by music for soprano and 2 flutes.) Music for instruments and electronic sounds often attempts (and often fails) to achieve a symbiosis between these two components; in khasma,x between the human performers and their disembodied counterpart lies an unbridgeable “gulf”. The instrumental music could be seen as a sequence of “theories” concerning its own material, which evolve from relative disorder towards being pervaded by symmetries and canonic interrelations, but always with a complementary tendency towards chaos. (For example, the fifth section is a highly deterministic five-part canon by both durational and intervallic augmentation, though in a state of gradual crumbling dissolution.) The electronic part, on the other hand, has the character of “discovered” sound-objects (discovered in a computer, that is) which resist such formalisation.
© Richard Barrett