Gauze and Particulate (2024)

New Music Ensemble (11 players)

15 minutes

Note

Gauze and Particulate begins as a slow accumulation of muttering voices. These mutterings climb over one another until they express themselves as a sinewy mesh of shifting and churning. In this sound-mass the strings enact an arpeggiation that is linear and angular that then gets recapitulated by the winds shortly afterward. All the while the sounds are morphing and sliding over one another, until finally a moment of genuine catharsis is reached, exploding with thorny viscosity, and then retreating. Here, sounds chatter anxiously and quietly in the corners. This grows into an urgent stretching and pulling, pulsing like a raw nerve. We morph back into the anxious blossoming material and then all the matter begins to settle. In this dust a shimmering grows as dispirit voices come together in an overlapping weave. This ooze piles onto itself until it is threatening and then the sound stops. In the end there is just chords and silence and then a final sound with quiet punctuations by the winds.

Gauze and Particulate was commissioned by the San Francisco based ensemble Stolen Time, and first completed in April 2024.