Majority of One

For three sustaining instruments and low room feedbackFor ‘Arcades’ 2016, premiered in Berlin, May 17 2016Other performances: 'Chance Firgurations' by Decibel at Tokyo Wondersite 10 December and Kunitachi College of Music, 15 December. This work is part of a series that explores the power of limited materials. Each instrument has a very limited and restricted range in the piece, but explores it through the timbral variation of pitch bending and extreme, constant, smooth control of microscopic change. This is also realized in a scored ‘room feedback’ part that engages the harmonic qualities of each venue the piece is played in.From an interview with David Charlton, Jolyon Laycock and Morton Feldman in 1966, the year of Hope’s birth:C: Do you think that indeterminate music, your music, is for yourself or for everybody?MF: I think it is for everybody; I think that all art has its special audience. You have the certain types of faces that you see at a Renaissance concert, at a Wagner concert. It has its audience as well as any other music has its audience. All audiences are departmentalised; so I think it is a kind of fantasy to think of a "serial" audience. I met someone who could only listen to Mendelssohn: he was an audience of one.L: As long as you have an audience, no matter how large or small it is, your music has a reason.MF: Well, one is a majority of one![CH: But one is a dangerous number]This piece uses the Decibel ScorePlayer to read the score and generate the electronic part, and you can download the score player file. Or you can play with the video of the score, with a line out for the audio, downloadable here. You will need the instructions if you use this version.