Untitled for harpsichord
November 2016
A harpsichord piece created during the Serpentine Galleries' Magazine Sessions 2016, as part as red, yellow, lime, pink, lavender, green, scarlet, lavender, scarlet, green, lavender, a multi-disciplinary performance piece involving:
Scoli Acosta Burke & Pryde Ceramica Gatti Christian Holstad Marc Hundley Erin Ellen Kelly Gabriele Levi Martin Maugeais Alison O'Daniel Tara Jane O'Neil Micki Pellerano
The path leads to a vivarium in which to enter the path. It is here where you find the expecting. An impregnated pause. The air is ripe with condensation.
red, yellow, lime, pink, lavender, scarlet, green, lavender.
~
My fascination for the sound of the harpsichord guided the writing of this piece. Tempi are expressed loosely, a way to give the interpret the freedom to explore the sound production within the limits of the acoustics – something that changes according to the instrument, the room and the player and therefore is never the same. In other words, tempi are informed by the specific acoustics of each performance. Most parts (three out of four) are even unmeasured: the rhythm itself is for the player to find within these boundaries.
Looking back on the piece I realize it reflects more than my interest in an instrument: the rhythm-less parts find their origin in the unmeasured preludes of the 17th century, and the use of ornamentation (both written and implied) is a distant echo of the Baroque style. But the quasi-absence of harmonic or melodic content might obfuscate this influence; others might be more obvious to the ear: pre-tonal music, indian ragas, or 20th or 21st century music.
A large part of the composition (transformations of the musical material) was made using Python, a high-level, general-purpose programming language; it was a way to explore the pertinence of basic programming constructs, such as control flow statements, in the context of classical music notation (rendered with the engraving software LilyPond). MM, December 2016
The Magazine Sessions 2016 | Christian Holstad | Serpentine
