Multiplex

Written in 2023 for Floris Van der Veken, Daniel Adamcyk, and Artur Korotin. Multiplex for saxophone, trumpet, and violin is a piece that deals with the imbalances of its unusual instrumentation. I wanted to be able to organize all of the sounds on these instruments to be of equal importance, as if I could hear every note and every sound at the same time. Pitched sound – let alone non-pitched sound – has its own unique qualities when played on instruments which have different acoustic principles. In parts of the piece, it ignores these differences as a way of accentuating them, while in others it attempts to reconcile them. In a sense, the piece behaves as if it’s trying to draw a logical conclusion from illogical premises. Pitch and noise exist neither as opposites nor as a smooth continuum; sounds on these instruments exist more like discontinuously quantized zones of sonic potentialities each with their own shape and size. Symmetrical structures contain objects that are inherently asymmetrical, not as a way of controlling them but simply to present them.