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ruin (1985-96) |
Large Ensemble - 18'
ruin forms the eleventh and last part of a series of compositions collectively entitled Fictions, which range in scale from a single instrument to the eighteen players of the present work.
One of the "thematic" strands running through these compositions, occasionally emerging into the foreground, is the "fiction" of likening the act of composition (and, by extension, the psychological structure of the music as projected to a listener) to a process of "speculative reconstruction". The music evolves as an attempt to propose a hypothetical wholeness or coherence - based on a collection of clues, connecting theories and fragments, whose chaotic, eroded condition may have resulted from the (mal)functioning of the memory (as when reconstructing a narrative from a remembered dream) or the forces of nature (as when reconstructing the appearance of an ancient artefact or creature from ruins or fossils).
In ruin this strand is brought to a point of culmination (though by no means one of conclusion): it consists essentially of a set of seemingly independent compositional structures, for a variety of instrumental and spatial configurations, which are broken up, interspersed and confused with one another, like archaeological or geological (or psychological) strata, and held together in a tenuous (again "fictional") attempt at an overall form by a superimposed scaffold or skeleton provided by the three percussionists.
Central to the conception of ruin is the formalised distribution of its six instrumental trios through the performing space, so that its timbral processes, already in an intimate relationship to the physical characteristics of the instruments and their diverse combinations, enter also into such a relationship with the performing space itself. The architecture of the Schömer-Haus facilitates a multidimensional deployment of instruments and sounds, both vertically and horizontally, and indeed ruin was conceived in the first instance with that very architecture as an "instrumental" component in the music.
ruin was completed in the summer of 1995 to a commission from the Schömer-Haus, for which many thanks to Karlheinz Essl, and is dedicated to Iannis Xenakis.
© Richard Barrett