Bang on a Can

I have a fascination with a kind of urban energy which mixes intellectual concerns with streetwise attitudes and sounds. That's just me. There is often something fundamentally cheap, obvious and physically joyful, yet serious about what I do. When writing the piece, I entertained an image of passing through streets of terraced houses at some speed. There are large movements of dynamic change, for instance registral and harmonic collapses, reconstituting to form new areas of focus, but these happen often in interlocking, seemingly static terrace steps. Another image that often stole into my mind, by the way, was of the constantly crashing cars in the Chrysler Building in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3. This static repetitive process produces a very dynamic if not pleasant result. Lastly, there is an anger that I feel against establishment politics and media/propaganda at the moment. There is a worrying new energy at work and my heart is with the (normally easy-going!) person in the street who wants to shout and do something about it, despite the seeming deafness of those in power. I'm not even political, it's just reached epic proportions.

If you want some technical details, I can tell you that over the last two years I've become more and more interested in particular usages of microtones to enliven my harmonies (in a spectral way) at important points and to articulate various kinds of discrete glissandos. I was wondering where this desire for pitch- bending came from. I remember when I was a student in the U.S. I was dead against it, thinking of it as simply an academic thing, but I have not been able to stop the flow of it in my music. Indeed I've had to come to terms with it and develop techniques for using microtones. Then it struck me at my sister's wedding last year, when towards the end of the evening, various cousins and friends stood up (sometimes on the tables - drink was taken) to sing. It's in the blood - this type of bending of the pitch, often at the back of the throat! Of course, there are other influences - spectral music, the intense pitch bending of a lot of pop music and the great American experimentalists of the 20th century for instance, but my pieces are not a demonstration of some type of dogma; rather, I've tried very hard to integrate these microtonal developments within the rhythmic and harmonic energy of my music.

The piece was commissioned by WNYC Radio New York for the Bang On A Can All-Stars, and special thanks are due to John Schaefer, host of WNYC's mould-breaking New Sounds programme, for making it happen. -Donnacha Dennehy