measurement as contrition: three canons [2017]

for orchestra [3.3.3.0 2.3.3.1 3perc hp 10.10.10.6.4]

duration :: 15’

Written for Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

First performance :: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (cond. Ilan Volkov) — Tectonics Glasgow, 6 May 2018

Score published by Edition Gravis.

[ BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, cond. Ilan Volkov :: Live, Glasgow City Halls, 6 May 2018 ]

Gregory the Great’s Homilies on the Prophet Ezekiel include extended discourses on the penitential act of measuring the dimensions of the prophet’s imagined citadel: a physically impossible space. ‘Look upon divine realities,’ writes Gregory, ‘and yet remember your human limitations.’

measurement as contrition is an inaccessible, distant, privately meditative hovering over the measurement of spaces and the weighing of volumes. Most of the volumes here are empty or nearly so, their boundaries suggested extremely faintly; the spaces are negative. The orchestra is there, in large part, as potential, an outer bound.

Some of these spaces contain fragments from Matteo da Perugia’s chanson “Le grant desir”, but they have been wiped almost entirely away.