for percussion trio and live electronics
Composer: Paul Schuette
As Einstein showed us, time and space are intimately linked. Space-time Julienne seeks to draw upon this concept by presenting a phenomenological experience that tugs at our understanding of this relativistic drama. In more musical terms, this is music that attempts to use space as a contrapuntal axis – a source of tension, development, and drama.
An incredibly condensed history of painting would tell the story of perspective: how a two-dimensional surface can give the impression of the third. (Modern painters have abstracted and subsumed this concept in the best possible ways.) Over the past hundred years or so, the history of sculpture shows a similar yearning. From Calder’s mobiles, to Smithson’s earthworks, to the kinetic sculptors of the present, sculptors have broken down the three-dimensional constraints of their medium by adding the fourth dimension – the temporal. Can music, which has always existed in this four walled arena, achieve a similar goal?
What these advancements offer to these other mediums is a reflexive perspective. The perspective that asks, “What is a urinal?” A perspective that allows the medium to abstract upon its potentials, so perhaps you can see it for what it really is. In this way, I want to write music that looks at music. Music that uses time to explore what it is inside of space. A ball of energy that extrudes itself from time.