fl, ob, cl, clb, fg, cor, tr, tn, pf, acc, soprano, baritono, vn I, vn II, vla, vc, cb (all strings amplified)
Commissioned by The Platform (for the festival “Future music”)
1. timecode I (aria)
A. chord
2. cento I
3. [endless] melody I (quasi timecode)
B. chord
4. syntax I
5. cento II
C. chord
6. timecode II (concerto)
7. [endless] melody II (quasi syntax)
8. cento III
D. chord suite
9. syntax II
10. [endless] melody III (quasi cento)
E. chord
11. timecode III (variations)
The best prospects for the future of music lie perhaps not with the composer but the listener. Listeners build themselves contexts that would occur to no composer, and they are rarely deliberate about it. I tried to approach my material the way a listener approaches a playlist. Listeners want variety. Composers, who strive to be themselves and no one else, do not.
My work reflects upon the desire of the listener: hence its formal properties. It consists of eleven parts of four different types, each placing what is properly mine and what isn’t into a special network of relations. Time Code measures nothing but time. Syntax offers a story at once coherent and full of lacunae. Cento, or collage of quotations, emphasizes switches between the musics. It’s a chaotic world but it has a single listener: me, and I do listen to it rather than stylize or borrow. There is no syntax here, to the extent that there can be no syntax. Nor is there syntax in Endless Melody—but because of an almost total, uninterrupted coherence. The result is a composition of flickering identity. My individuality (a composition machine rather than an individual style) appears to a different extent in different movements. There, where it’s weak, the author, becoming only marginally competent, as it were, does things that he generally doesn’t allow himself
(Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky)
Premiere at Winzavod Moscow. MCME cond. by Fedor Lednev, voices: Olga Rossini, Sergei Malinin