Shortlist Selection, 2007 Ensemblia Festival

Duration: 6'20"
Dedication: Aaron Cassidy

 [ Cantus Ensemble; MP3 excerpt in new window ]

Performance History

7/15/05 [recording] - Arditti Quartet - L'Arsenal, Metz, France

6/3/07 [first public performance] - Cantus Ensemble - 2007 Ensemblia Festival, Mönchengladbach, Germany

Broadcast on WDR 3 (German radio), 10 January 2008

"The first piece was the string quartet 'Line of Wreckage' by the American Evan Johnson (b. 1980). He burdened the
Cantus Ensemble with unusual obstacles. The string instruments' bows are to be treated with as little rosin as possible,
and only loosely strung. The musicians are then required to play with 'futile energy,' as it says atop the score, to
elicit a dense tissue of sound, from which a single voice occasionally emerges and then sinks again almost into
nothingness."

-- Gazette: Neue Music in NRW, July/August 2007 edition

 

Program Note

Line of Wreckage (the title is from a “non-site” artwork by the American land artist Robert Smithson) takes as its postulates a number of extremely limiting factors, several of which were chosen specifically to counteract intuitive tendencies in my own recent work.  Most obviously, the hair of the players’ bows is loosened and as little rosin applied as possible, greatly compromising the dynamic and timbral range of the ensemble (and highlighting those actions, including col legno bowing, pizzicati, col legno battuto, etc. where the bowhair is not used); other restrictions, aimed against my own habits, include the stipulation that there is to be no silence in the music, a bias towards locally regular rhythmic impulses and “open” intervals, and an emphasis on repeated notes.  In other ways, continuing interests of mine are manifest: an insistence on physical awkwardness and instability, a pronounced disconnect between the performers’ physical exertion and the sonic result, and the fundamental importance of proportional duration structures that have the potential to frustrate the local materials’ ability to fill them.

 

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