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Nebula

By thisisuser on August 16, 2019

for piano solo
composed 2019, duration 9 minutes
composed while resident composer at CAPUT Ensemble

Nebula is a composition that develops on certain ideas on micro-timing that go back to Three Places from 2011. It has been present in other compositions since then, and it concerns different usages of minute timing fluctuations as an integral part of a composition. That is, instructions for the use of what is traditionally a performative rubato, but here used in certain ways and in specific circumstances.

The first part of Nebula is of a gentle legato-tenuto style with a round and soft sonority, but the individual voices accompany the crescendoes by a speeding up of the tempo, just as the diminuendos are performed with a similar slowing down.

Treated independently this way, the simultaneous speeding up and slowing down of concurrent voices renders impossible the notated vertical rhythmic coincidence, since the voices continuously shift towers and away from each other. An absolute coincidence is obviously not intended either, as the goal is the notion of rhythmic ‘detuning’ that a precise notation never could achieve, since this technique belongs to the realm of what is customarily known as performance features. This ‘moving away’ between the voices can easily be as much as an eight-note (or even more), done as it is at the performer’s discretion.

The second section – with material derived from the aforementioned Three Places – takes a different approach to this inner freedom of tempo, as the chordal coincidence always is to be avoided with no two notes played at the exact same time. The result is that of a constantly varying ‘micro-arpeggio’, within the section’s overall constant tempo.

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