not even the rain
Benjamin Thigpen
Notes de programme
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
When I was maybe 12 or 13 years old, I read a short story about a man who was to be hanged. He mounted the scaffold
I have since been fascinated with this sort of temporal pocket, in which years of experience can be folded into a fraction of a second. The temporality of not even the rain is based on this model.
All the sound events of the piece evolve out of two groups of percussive attacks — one at the very beginning, the other about a third of the way through. As the resonance of the initial attack-group slowly fades away, the music sinks into it, tracing something like a descent into its tiniest elements. These then become increasingly animated, shifting and evolving in sometimes unpredictable ways. The two halves of the piece (following the two attack-groups) sketch similar gestures — descending through layers of soundspace — the second moving more quickly, speaking more emphatically, falling more drastically. And arriving, in the final section of the piece, at something like the “heart of mystery.”
What it’s about. The vast energy concealed within any object, the infinite mystery beyond every surface. Perceiving this energy, piercing through the world-as-surface, plunging through mysterious layers. Falling. Exploring this endless, ungraspable energy.
not even the rain is entirely dependent on “the speaking of the object”
All the sounds were generated by sound processing programs I wrote in Max/MSP. The music was composed and spatialized in 8 channels using Pro Tools at the studios of Musiques & Recherches (Ohain, Belgium). not even the rain was a finalist in the Concorso Internazionale di Composizione Città di Udine (Italy, 2002).
- Compositeur·trice(s): Benjamin Thigpen
- Année de composition: 2000
- Durée: 9:49
- Instrumentation: support 8 canaux
