2

Negotiating the Absolute Location of Buoyancy 

for horn

commissioned by Dal Niente for Matthew Oliphant

Score

 

Performance History

  • Swiss premiere by Samuel Stoll on April 28, 2016 in Zürich as part of the IGNM Zürich musicserie.
  • Performed by Samuel Stoll on February 22, 2016 at the University of Huddersfield (UK).
  • UK premiere by Samuel Stoll on February 20, 2016 at the Nexus Art Cafe in Manchester, England.
  • German premiere by Samuel Stoll on December 15, 2015 at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Leipzig, Germany.
  • Finnish premiere given by Samuel Stoll on February 10, 2014 in Helsinki, Finland.

 

About

Influences on the composition of Negotiating the Absolute Location of Buoyancy, in no particular order: Dal Niente Executive Director Ryan Muncy’s statement that this work was being commissioned for a “concert called ‘Hard Music Hard Liquor’, which gives you an idea of the type of piece we’re looking for”; my first confrontation with the horn; a discussion with an eighth grader on the geographic term “absolute location”; Hans Tutschku asking me about my use of pitch, and being dissatisfied with my initial answer; Steven Takasugi asking me about surface clarity and what I take out of my music, and reminding me that grains of sand become pearls. I hope that some of these grains of sand become pearls.

This piece was commissioned by Ensemble Dal Niente and written for Matthew Oliphant. I am exceedingly thankful for the support and encouragement of the ensemble in general, which is an almost-improbable assemblage of special people, and of Matt in particular, who fielded my endless stream of questions with grace, and applied himself to the perhaps-absurd demands of this piece with aplomb. I cannot overstate my gratitude for the experience of working with him.