April 12, 2025

Back in 2017 on April 12, I got 11 guitarists together to play my piece Mandalas. Here's a bit from a section later dropped, where everyone had some esoteric instructions. The piece was simple on paper. Tempo was 60 bpm, most of the notes marked we whole notes tied together across bars, sometimes 30 seconds to a minute long before changing notes. This created some anticipation to get the note change right. With 11 guitarists you could hear that anticipation. In this little section, the instructions were to look at the dynamic marking and assign a fixed number of articulations to a bar. If I marked 'pp', it might be one per bar, but if it was 'f' it might be 8. If 'fff', it was as many as possible. The player could play whenever they felt like it, within the bar, within the confines of those rules. With 11 players, the resulting texture was sometimes pointilistic, sometimes condensing into a cloud. To help unify everyone's volume and get them to listen to each other, we talked about the surface of water. "Listen to the surface your neighbors create. If you are louder that them, you are poking your head too far above the surface. Bring it back down." Link to the post.