Music vanishes.
Time, which makes it possible, is also the one erasing it. It survives in an instant and disappears, perhaps leaving an imprint on our memory. We try to fix its memory through sheet music, notes or recordings, but the result is always the same: the music escapes us, like water between our fingers.
"Contorns", for flute, clarinet, sax and electronics, is a new attempt to freeze the imprint of music through graphic notation. Spectral landscapes that outline the expressive contours of instruments and that, during a small window of time, allow us to intuit future listening.
Composed through algorithmic and generative processes, the score is inspired by the musicalization of geological processes. Mud, sediments, crystallization and dust as ingredients of a music that serves as a microscopic atlas for phenomena on a superhuman time scale.
The concert, along the lines of the works in the FORMS series, is conceived as an audiovisual staging that gives full prominence to the graphic score. The performers, integrated into this video-projected landscape of visual music, transform the geometric contours into sound contours.
Fluctuations in atmospheric pressure that, measured and plotted on a histogram, would again result in the same score.
Contorns is a commission from the "Diffraccions" cycle, and was originally written for the CrossingLines Ensemble.
