In preparation

Tiding III is the third in a series of pieces partly inspired by Christiane Baumgartner’s 2013 wood cut Deep Water. I like her work very much, and in particular how this image evokes the perception of a liquid form through very precise means. This tension really interests me. The woodcut images approach abstraction – appearing endless – but bear the personal traces of an assiduous, intimate working method. Christiane Baumgartner’s practice transcribes flat, frozen images into woodcut, but their implied animation and depth inspires a more sculptural approach to sound. Like much of my music, Tiding III combines carefully calibrated non-tempered tunings (each guitar string is retuned to an overtone of an 11 hertz ground fundamental: the 6th , 10th , 14th , 21st , 22nd and 25 h partials) and a regularly tuned piano to create complex sonorities that are diffracted and transformed at different speeds along multiple planes. The pre-recorded sounds (created with Ensemble NIKEL) foreground quiet details in the piano resonance and auditory phenomena, and obscure the distinction between electronic and acoustic sounds. As when one contemplates the natural world itself, my hope is to create the conditions where time can be experienced differently, and where both those performing and those joining in listening are attuned to subtlety and the potential for gentle change.

tid-ing

verbto drift with or as if with the tide

to rise and fall like the tide