Ausschnitte [2003]

for violin, bass clarinet, and piano

duration :: 3’

First performance :: Movses Pogossian (vn), Jean Kopperud (bcl), Jacob Greenberg (pn) — SUNY Buffalo (Buffalo, NY), 30 March 2004

[ Echoi Ensemble :: Buffalo, NY, 16 April 2008 ]

The metaphor of viewing a solid object from different angles in three-dimensional space is an overused one in the discussion of musical form, but it is overused because it is apt.  Because of the relentlessly linear canvas in which composers are forced to work, whether they call their forms “circular” or “spiral” or “nonlinear”, repetition is the only basic mechanism we have to expose and explore the various potentialities of a single material locus.  Repetition, in Ausschnitte, is linearized heterophony.

Given the repetitive framework and the short duration of the piece, the “trailing-off” form seemed to me to be a necessity; the definite harmonic region expostulated by the piano in minutely different ways, followed inevitably by the lyrically unfocused, failed response in the other two instruments, is not so much an object in three-dimensional space but an object trailed by its anti-object, from which it will not be separated.

The title locates this small piece in a series of works reacting to paintings of Gerhard Richter.