Charles David Wajnberg | Grains | 2014-2015 | 31'

Big solo percussion set-up

Link for the score | Composer's website

Working with percussions is very revealing of the ambiguous space which lies between the symbolic thought of writing and the physical experience of sound. The musical graphics, indeed effective to calibrate specific impacts, hardly reflects the complex phenomena which make the richness of acoustic instruments: complexity of attacks, durations and colour of resonances, etc.

The field of “grains”, however, that of granular synthesis and sand pile physics, makes possible to compose with sensible properties far beyond (and below) the logical categories of music notation: mass, density, roughness, brightness, etc. Like an organic cell, the heavy grain of a bass drum beat can be divided into the many seeds of a rain stick, then again reduced to the invisible asperities of a bow hair, scraping the edge of a cymbal.

Inside this sound continuum, the successive mutations lead to forms which are emancipated from the idioms of writing and archetypes of language (declamation, suspense or surprise). The solid matter of the instruments is dissolved into the fluidity of timbres, and spreads like a liquid through network paths. Grains is the exploration of a single sound, deconstructed and reconstructed through different scales, which unfold an artificial material, only perceptible by hearing.

Grains is dedicated to Konstantyn Napolov.