For solo trombone and pre-recorded trombone, written for and premiered by Giordano Mor in 2024.
This is the first piece I composed after a 4 years hiatus in which I focused mostly on improvisation. I owe the composition to my friend Giordano Mor, who exhorted me to collaborate on a solo piece. The result was entirely tailored to his sound and idiosyncrasies, the construction of his trombone, and the mutes he uses. During the compositional process we worked on understanding the tuning relations between the B-flat pipe and the F attachment of his instrument, which resulted in a microtonal mapping of B-flat positions on the F attachment, which allowed an idiomatic performance of the microtonal melodies used in the piece. Once the mapping had been completed I was able to create a basic melodic idea (a sort of theme for the whole piece) which we then recorded using different mutes, each mute drawing different parabolic connections between the main notes of such melody: the most open mutes—straight and plastic—perform just short-trajectory glissandos, while the most muffled ones—cup and bucket—performing larger trajectories that used the slide up to the full length. The aim was to generate timbral auras that decorate each note detaching from the original pitch, with the full sound of the unmuted trombone in the core and progressively veiled timbre towards the extremes of the aura. This is perhaps a difficult concept to convey in words: the full melodic idea, performed by the open trombone and all the pre-recorded mutes simultaneously, appears at the end of the middle section of the piece (at minute 10:12-10:42 of the video-recording below). Most of the rest of the piece was composed using fragments of this basic melodic idea (the ‘earworm’) which appears transfigured when performed by the different mutes because of the various parabolic glissandi between notes. The constant repetition and fragmentation of the melody effectively constitutes an act of ‘variation’ of (rather than ‘on’) a theme. Instead of presenting the theme at the beginning, the process is reversed: the tiniest fragments of the melody are heard at the beginning and performed with the steepest glissandi (the notes of the melody are just touched by constantly moving curved glissandi). Ideally, the listener should not realise that the melodic material is generated through variation (or rather fragmentation, because presented in reverse), but just feel an organic build up of a concrete melody from sinuous glissandi. The whole piece is a progressive build up to the full theme—which constitutes the climax—to then decompose it again, by literally disassembling the instrument.
The meetings necessary for mapping the instrument and recording the takes were generously supported by the Royal College of Music Research Fund.
FURTHER IMPORTANT NOTES: The audience should wear earplugs during the first few minutes of the piece, being instructed to remove them once the trombonist applies the first mute. While keeping the earplugs on, the audience is invited to focus on their own breathing as well as what they hear coming from outside their head. They are also invited to make feeble and low growl noises to ‘duet’ with the trombonist in their private perception. The trombone starts the piece performing long notes ad lib., intermitted by breath sounds.
This beginning offers an intimate, internal listening experience of the music inside the listener’s own head. Once the earplugs are removed the listening becomes external and spatialised (enhanced by the quadrophonic disposition of the pre-recorded trombone in the speakers), but the timbral transformation continues starting from muffled and opening up progressively—the trombone sounds being filtered by mutes, from bucket to straight, through cup and plastic. The piece is divided into 3 sections presented without solution of continuity.
1. Parasitic Worm—the melody (earworm) starts generating inside the head of the listener, through the use of earplugs
2. Proliferative Worm—the earworm melody starts building up and multiplying in the space building polyphony
3. Decomposing Worm—once the earworm melody has been fully presented (see first paragraph) the trombone itself is disassembled, decomposing and ‘detimbring’ the melody.
Because this piece (as, after all, much of my composition) relies on the physical and spatial perception of sounds, the recording below can only be a pale approximation of the experience. This listening will require some exercise of imagination to get a sense of the actual performance: