The title is taken from an improvised poem by Buckminster Fuller:
Environment to each must be “All that is including me.”
Universe in turn must be “All that is including me.”
The incentive to write this piece came from reading the book Return from space by the Japanese journalist Takashi Tachibana. It is a collection of descriptions by some twenty American cosmonauts of their sojourn in space in the sixties. I was impressed by the spiritual power of the related experiences, and especially by the religious feeling. At the same time, the scientific literature on outer space also opened up a number perspectives: the idea of “complex rotation systems” for instance (such as with the Sun, Moon and Earth) which create specific variation processes, light/shadow effects, and thus make for cyclical time within which expansion and contraction alternate.
The musical structure and function of the gagaku resembles such a complex rotation system. The key qualities here are:
– repetition
– binary time frame
– a long metrical unit at the beginning and end of each phrase
– a drumbeat at the end of each period
– the entire rhythmical material is the outcome of the combinatorics of a few rhythmic cells which are simple and of varying duration
– a phrase is the juxtaposition of expanded or compressed motifs, in which a cell or a motif can insert it-self.
I was interested in combining these few fundamental rules with the principle of complex roation systems. The three instruments work autonomously around brief motifs: trills, third trills, glissando, held note, held note with change of timbre, silence. And every one of the instruments restricts or expands these motifs, depend-ing on their individual phase and speed.
(Misato Mochizuki)
