Traces Across Folds
Bruno GuastallaI have spent most of my working life looking after and making musical instruments (violins, violas, cellos). That there is much in common between this activity and making and writing music doesn’t come as a surprise. For me, the concept of work, which talks of relationships within and without, seems apt.
Writing music: what does it consist of for me? There seem to be tangible pressures at play, which I think of while writing this paragraph now. Time for a short list, in no particular order: discontinuity; same/different; origin; entropy; weighted probability; simultaneous/sequential; violence; love; language; incompleteness.
The latest piece I have worked on, Traces Across Folds, is written as a text score which specifies a scale (one to five) of similarity and difference between subsequent discrete events. The sequence of events is arranged according to the simple arithmetic combinations known as superpermutations. The conflicting imperatives they contain, ‘all possible combinations of n variables’ and ‘the shortest string’ bring out properties of quasi symmetry. Quasi because there is an origin, a point from which...
As several players use the same sequence at their own speed, the piece loosely makes use of canon, which creates an oblique ambiguity between what is simultaneous and what is sequential. Violence comes in the form of an invitation to join in with silence when silence looms.
Except for one of the musicians, sonic material and sound producing devices are the prerogative of the performers. I am a bit ambivalent towards the beauty of sound, cherry-picked-slice-of-life. In my work on instruments, doing daily sound adjustments for players, what seems desirable, rather than the beauty or character of a sound, is a sort of grace, an ease (or sometimes unease) in the movement from one quality to another.
When a piece is played, the chaos of sound, of life, is soon enough full of infinite precision.
In 2015, Wolf Notes invited composers and musicians to write a short text about one of their own pieces. A word count of no more than 500-words was the only guidance given.
Bruno Guastalla is a French / British cellist and bandoneonist, based in Oxford, UK. He has been restoring and making violins and cellos since 1983 as part of Oxford Violins.