hyphen
Evan Johnson
About this work:
The most difficult challenge in the composition of a very short work is to characterize the musical material strongly enough that the piece’s effect is not buried in the cheap shock of its brevity. Music that is contained in a miniature space, it seems to me, must engage with that containment, make it an indispensable and inevitable result of musical processes.
In hyphen, I make use of the extremely resonant sound of the crotales to infiltrate, recharacterize and thus appropriate the silence that surrounds the piece’s one-minute duration. The music is very quiet throughout; but more importantly, there are large swaths of resonant silence in which harmonic detritus is left floating, redefining the lack of musical (notated, performative) activity as a primary locus of musical interest.
The brevity of the piece is also motivated internally by its extreme difficulty of performance – not just because of its technical requirements and intricate rhythmic language, but in physical terms as well. The instrument is struck in two ways: first, with mallets, absolutely as softly as possible; and second, with the fingers and knuckles of the hands, which requires exertion (and some tolerance for pain!) on the performer’s part if any sound is to result at all. In both cases, bodily fatigue is an integral part of the performance experience, and a minute becomes a long time indeed.
Year composed: 2002
Duration: 00:01:00
Ensemble type: Solo instrument, non-keyboard:Percussion (General)
Instrumentation: 1 Other Percussion Instrument(s)
Instrumentation notes: Two chromatic octaves of crotales