Australian Composers Orchestral Forum provides emerging composers the opportunity to work with a professional symphony orchestra
ACOF 2002 Participant - Damian Barbeler
Damian Barbeler's Elastic Horizons, was a composition written for ACOF 2002.
...a certain visual aesthetic (especially in fine art and architecture) has been consistently catching my eye...
Program Notes - Elastic Horizons
In the last year a certain visual aesthetic (especially in fine art and architecture) has been consistently catching my eye. This particular aesthetic effect made such an impression on me that I found myself on constant watch for it. I started a visual diary with photos of favorite examples, and made attempts at reproducing this aesthetic myself in sketches and drawings. I have also become a vociferous reader of the latest books on architecture and contemporary design.
The best example I have found (the one that sent the most "that’s it" sparks flying round my brain), was a small art work by Iranian born, Australian artist Hossein Valamanesh (b. 1949). It consisted of two square canvases, on the right an earthy yellow canvas with many small dots of different coloured sands arranged in a grid, and on the left, a canvas totaly covered in flattened lotus leaves, all cut in equal sized squares and also arranged in a grid. It is hard to capture the atmosphere of this work here, but the effect was arresting, the reguar grid arrangements setting off the variations in colour of the sands, and the random fanning and infinite colour gradation of the laqured leaves. A gentle tension was apparent which I now know to be a product of the ultra strict arrangement of natural textures.
Of course the point of all of this noticing, sketching and reading was to to decifer the governing principles of a style which I now desperately wanted to transfere to music. I quickly discovered some common threads.
Firstly, all examples tended to have a strict structure, housing lush random or grainy textures. Secondly, there was usually an element of the unexpected, often when two contrasting materials or textures were brought together in an surprisingly homogeneous or dramatically brutal fashion. Thirdly, there was often an element of chaos, either in the nature of the textures or some satisfying corruption of an otherwise pristine arrangment of elements. Fourthly, the constituent textures were often rich and satisfying in and of themselves, and presented in large interposing swathes.
My research into architecture helped me find further threads that lead eventually to recent scientific and mathematical propositions. Two ideas in particular took my fancy, and I have used these ideas liberally in Elastic Horizons. These are, the multi-layering of many simple patterns to achieve a complex system, a technique features mainly in the upper winds and percussion, and the complimentary method of developing through the constant subtle corrution of an ordered system, an effect rendered in the strings, the asymetrical periodicity of which is the core driving factor of the piece.
