7 mins
Date 2008
In Time Entwined, In Space Enlaced explores many ways of interweaving, intersecting and interlocking its musical elements.
These ideas are fundamental to my way of thinking about counterpoint, harmonic relationships, rhythmic structure and orchestration, and when I compose I am often guided by principles derived from them. For example, in the harmonic sphere, distinct lines or layers may be constructed from unique interlocking pitch constellations, which together comprise a totality (a complete portion of the whole chromatic). Rhythmically, one layer may sound only when a silence occurs in another. In other cases, the use of repetition and canonic or heterophonic textures creates (I hope) a sense of lines entwining round the spatially distributed musicians.
The ‘space’ I refer to in the work’s title is both the ‘real space’ of players distributed in the hall and the ‘musical space’ of pitch, time and timbre relationships. In abstract, musical space is a continuous realm — subject to our perceptual limitations — which may be conceptualised and ‘sculpted’ in many different ways: pentatonic, tonal, chromatic, microtonal, spectral. These are not necessarily exclusive, and though this piece was principally created according to various forming principles related to chromatic pitch-space, glimpses of other approaches are revealed through certain harmonic and timbral qualities, and the use of glissandos and expressive microtonal inflections. Breathing life into the timespace of the piece, there is often a respiratory sense of expansion and contraction, which operates at the local level of individual gestures and defines aspects of the large-scale form.
My musical concerns are never purely technical: there are also poetic and philosophic resonances to these ideas. I like the way that, when you unravel a piece of string, you find yourself with many strands, each essentially similar to the original piece of string; the individual strands reflect the whole, of which they are part. Similarly, as people, we become entwined in many connections and relationships (with one another and the world beyond), often revealing that we too are small parts of some greater whole.
It is hard to remember exactly where this piece began, but one recurrent point of reference and inspiration was the fifth section of David Gascoyne’s beautiful surrealist poem Antennae (Selected Poems, Enitharmon, 1994):
The timeless sleepers tangled in the bed
In the midst of the sonorous island, alone
The tongue between the teeth
The river between the sands
Love in my hand like lace
Your hand enlaced with mine.
© Christian Mason
Antennae excerpt reproduced by kind permission of Enitharmon Press.
