Ray Ray of Light (2022)
for 4 voices a cappella View score
Commissioned by Cantando Admont, funded by the GEMA Entwicklungsstipendium Neustart Kultur and supported by Styria-Artist-in-Residence of the City of Graz
Ray Ray of Light is a continuation of my research into translating digital audio processes—namely sampling—into the analog world of score writing. This research is embedded in the wider concern of trying to think (of) music towards its nonlinear, nondirectional sides; to think (of) music as existing more in space than in time; to think (of) music as a spatial art. There isn’t any meaning of this music hidden in the depth of its structure—its meaning exists right on and as the surface.
Following the logics of sampling—the ultimate postmodern, intertextual musical gesture—Ray Ray of Light is taking snippets of pre-modern, 12th century music and constantly rearranges cut-outs of musical gestures into a flickering static that blurs the boundary between gesture and texture, between foreground and background. The singers become a sampler—a sampler that glitches and in embracing these glitches creates jarred, jagged sculptures of sound that exist as an afterimage in the microscopic interstices connecting the almost-simultaneity of multiple, musical presents.
Ray Ray of Light is written in loving memory of Ryan Muncy.
Premiered by Cantando Admont:
Hugo Paulsson Stove, Bernd Lambauer, Matias Bocchio, Ulfried Staber.
Conductor: Cordula Bürgi
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Graz, AT
October 27th, 2022