Uns-Apparatus [2013]

brass quintet [5’]

[piccolo; soprano saxophone; bass clarinet; piano; percussion; violin; cello]

commissioned by Ensemble Apparat

performance history

12/4/2016 - Brooklyn Brass Quintet. Spectrum. New York.

9/23/2016 - Brooklyn Brass Quintet. FONT Festival. Mannes College. New York.

3/17/2016 - Ensemblekollektiv Berlin. Maerzmusik. Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Berlin, Germany.

9/4/2014 - Ensemble Apparat. Villa Elisabeth. Berlin, Germany.

6/27/2013 - Ensemble Apparat. Villa Elisabeth. Berlin, Germany.

program note

Being part of my "apparatus" series, Uns-Apparatus is concerned with creating a sound-body and a bodily sound. However, its bodily condition is extremely volatile, as if shape-shifting, involuntarily. The protean body may at once moment attain a manageable form, only to bud an unwieldy appendageal growth the next. [Imagine your body. Now imagine that your arm, or a single toe, is suddenly ten times its size.] The instruments themselves are connective tissues, constantly forming and reforming their collagenous coupling to one another as subcutaneous organs comprised of tendrils and dendrites. They are mutating bodies within the mutating body. [Imagine your body. Now imagine that your lungs, a single lung, or one chamber of the heart, or just your internal carotid artery, swells up to twenty times its size.] The skin does not break; it bulges.