tractatus figurarum: sloth [2026]

for guitar

duration :: 6’30”

Commissioned by Diego Castro Magas with the support of the Orpheus Instituut

First performance :: 5 November 2026, Orpheus Instituut, Gent, Belgium

Instruments are fundamentally amplifiers and colorizers of bodily movement and tensions, none more so than those—like the guitar—in which the musculature acts directly on a field of tension and resonance. Here those movements, though not those tensions, are reduced to a minimum: a subdued shivering, tremoring, successful and unsuccessful attempts to stop moving altogether, undergirded by, and in turn obscuring, various fragments of various chords, chorales, sequences.

The Tractatus figurarum is actually a brief fourteenth-century text attempting (though falling short of) a notational codification of the rhythmic practices of the ars subtilior. Mostly, though, I liked the phrase itself: a treatise on figures, rhythmic, muscular, private.