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On time dilation and synchronicity I

Commissioned by Arnold Marinissen and FC Jongbloed

For the quartet Fc Jongbloed I was asked to write a piece with the subject time. I decided to reread Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality and so I found my focus: density and simultaneousness. The core of the piece are some contrapunctual lines, hidden in the harpsichord part (bars 37-38). The other parts are (rhythmical) retrogrades of different parts of phrases, each with different length, from the left and right hand part. Each voice goes through a harmonic scheme, everyone’s material is constantly in each other’s neighbourhood but hardly ever at the same time. Until here this was one of my most strict pieces I had ever written. But then I decided this little machine too had to be disrupted. Some bars or parts of bars were repeated or taken out.

Often musicians are inclined to synchronise their parts and in this light, this piece is an obstacle course. Because of the rather complex rhythmical notation (in fact a sort of written out ritenuti and accelerandi) it is diffucult to find a common pulse. Sforzato’s pop up that often, but not always, sound at the same time. The musicians find each other around the middle of the piece but let go of the newfound synchronisation again. Roughly taken, the density decreases throughout the piece, spacetime keeps dilating. But also: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in sound.