Trio for piano violin cello (1998) by Plainsound Music Edition

live performance by Plainsound Orchestra 15 August 2003
in Reihe 0, Schwarzenberg, Bregenzerwald Austria
Stephen Clarke, Ekkehard Windrich, James Bush

This piece is part of a series of compositions that are based on a systematic documentation
or cataloguing of a set of possible acoustic circumstances. The process used in this case is
based on one possible realization of an instruction from Christian Wolff’s “Burdocks”, in which a performer is invited to make about 511 sounds, each different from the others.

This number happens to enumerate the set of all possible non-silent combinations of nine
sounds: (29 - 1).The idea of presenting all combinations from a fixed set of sounds has been translated into a list of chords tuned in Just Intonation. Each chord is made up of pitches from
the first eight odd partials of the harmonic series over A (1-3-5-7-9-11-13-15).

These tones are transposed into various octaves within a fixed range of the piano, following a simple cyclic pattern. The 12 pitch-classes available on a piano are retuned in all octaves to a subset of the overtones of 13.78125 Hz (5 octaves below A-441 Hz and 1 octave below the
lowest key of a standard modern piano), which produce sympathetic resonances depending on
the type of pedalling used.

The violin and cello, muted with apartment mutes throughout, sustain various tones from the chords, producing melodic lines. At the same time, the pitches played in the music, the resonances controlled by the pianist, as well as the nonlinear distortion produced in the air and in our ears, are all tuned components of a sustained sub-audio tone which remains constant throughout the duration of the composition.

The music is dedicated to Christina Sabat (1942-1998).