For 16 solo voices with percussion and electronics.
Ferneyhough writes: "Like the other two works in the Time and Motion Study cycle, this extended work for 16 solo singers with amplification and taped vocal materials sets out to map an unfamiliar terrain demarcated by extreme demands made on the performers, who are required to sing extensive passages with so-called extended techniques. The singers are divided into four independent formations of unequal size, which are placed at the four corners of the performance space. Behind each group is located a loudspeaker reproducing the sounds produced by the choir placed diametrically opposite, with the result that complex patterns of mutual interference and spatial distribution are evoked.
The independence of the groups is further underlined both by the initially sharply defined nature of their materials and the formal strategies employed in their unfolding. The first section of the piece is largely assembled from autonomous fragments of varying duration whose boundaries rarely coincide, even while the coherence and unity of the members of each group is constantly being emphasised. As this section develops, small percussion instruments are gradually added to the ensemble with a view to extending and focusing the sometimes extremely percussive sounds produced by the vocalists.
At the entry of the metal percussion the choral groups are suddenly dissolved, the individual singers constantly reforming in ever-new sub-ensemble allegiances. Characteristic of this section is the unison attack which initiates each sonic ‘molecule’ in the chain, and which serves to highlight the almost chaotic proliferation of nuance which immediately follows. A final, overwhelming percussion crescendo leads to the third and final part of Time and Motion Study III. Here, all voices participate in a confused and variegated ‘sound carpet’, in which individual, manically executed vocal details are drowned out by the continuous tutti roar. One of my models here was undoubtedly the oceanic flow of Tallis’ 40-part motet Spem in Alium, in which vowels and consonants are miraculously detached from one another to inhabit two entirely distinct but temporally concurrent worlds. After a sequence of short episodes, in some of which a tape of immediately previously sung chords is superimposed on the continuing ebb and flow of live voices, a final dissolution into the heights and depths of the ensemble occurs, the texture fluctuating into and out of focus rather like an old radio on which reception is feeble, distorted and inconstant.
Like many of my compositions of the 1970s, this 24-minute composition attempts to integrate and synthesize several philosophical, aesthetic and social domains of discourse into a single destabilized and fluid organism. For the listener of today, it may be that the issues thus broached are less immediately relevant than the obvious urgency with which I was attempting to penetrate into a world where the smallest particles of language are continually being melted down and reforged in the service of a belief (still current today) that structure and expression are truly one."
Brian Ferneyhough - Time and Motion Study III (1974) video phone lyrics | |
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