Instrumentation
Solo Violin
General commentary
This piece is written in response to Louise Nevelson’s sculpture ‘Black Wall’ (1959). It was Nevelson’s concept and construction of this sculpture that has inspired my fairly direct musical interpretation of the same idea. Nevelson created this piece by building wooden boxes filled with objects that she found when walking around the streets of New York. The random collection of materials and fragments of certain objects (such as furniture) are brought together and only unified by their colour having all been painted black. The concept behind my piece is inspired by this idea of a unification of small seemingly random elements into a unified whole. Short sporadic ideas are the foundation of this work. Despite the large number of motifs in this piece the work is held together (and almost pulled back) by its sense of movement without real movement. Despite the various elements moving from one motif to the other the whole direction of the piece is held in place. This is the same technique that Nevelson has applied by painting everything black. The unifying colour brings all the objects together, highlighting none but presenting all elements out each object. I have used this concept to lay bare the elements of the composition around a form that seems fixed, contained within its boundaries as the elements are held in the boxes of the sculpture. Although some elements are seemingly unrelated and often disjointed the effect of being held together remains.
This work is constructed through the idea of the material coming and going in waves, much in the same way as the flow of people and traffic in the streets of a big city. The small units of musical ideas represent the impressions that would surround a walk in such an environment and the objects you may come across. The work moves both in rhythm, pitch and harmonic rhythm according to the ebb and flow of the respective pulses of material. The frequent pulling of the work onto a tonal centre of G (in particular through the on-occasion drone-like use of the open string) helps to hold the work into its form, acting as the black paint on the sculpture does. The opening material recapitulates at the end to show that all journeys of this nature come around – the artist returning to their studio, the commuter returning home. The drop-in tempo and pitch at the end of the work represents that although our journey has returned to the same place the events of the rest of the work have had an effect of wiriness and subjugation.