Multiplicities - for Multi-Tracked Bass Flute (2016)

All tracks performed and recorded by Laura Cocks at the Columbia Computer Music Studios in New York City.

Amidst the transmission of a musical idea, between the composer, score, performer, and audience, there is invariably a rich capacity for interpretation, contingency, and variability. It is often in these inconsistencies that a work finds its depth, as variable interpretations inevitably cast new light on a musical subject, imbuing it with a variety of perspectives, energies, and characterizations.

This work, ”Multiplicities”, is scored for indefinitely multi-tracked (pre-recorded/live-looped and layered) bass flute, in it, I aim to objectify the variabilities that occur from one performance to the next. I attempted to develop a notation that is, in one sense, quite specific in its prescriptive instructions, yet in another, highly receptive in its harnessing and objectifying of the nuances and variabilities that happen from one performance to the next. When the instruments become layered, these variabilities infuse the work with a variegated color, allowing what is essentially one part, to sound like a swarm or a mass of individual lines. The challenge was how to develop material in a range of variability, and to allow this range to dilate and contract as I saw fit, but not let these variabilities run out of control and obstruct my ability to articulate cohesive structural and formal shapes.