It’s not the same all the time. Sometimes I start with sounds, like in this case for Spectral Fields in Time. I started with the cymbal actually, by experimenting with this close amplification technique I’ve been using. Once I found the sound I wanted where you could hear all the sonorities in the cymbal, I transcribed the sonorities I heard on the cymbal. All the notes that are in the piece come out of the cymbal. The interesting thing is that the cymbal is not a definite or perfect instrument. When you play a string it has a fundamental pitch, say a C, but the fundamental pitch is not also maybe B or a little bit flat C at the same time, it’s one note: C. But the cymbal is an imperfect piece of metal that’s hammered and sort of tuned by an artisan so you hear not only one fundamental, but a couple of fundamentals which means that the harmonic series is much more complex. That’s where all those notes came from, maybe they don’t come out of a fundamental C but they come out of a fundamental B or B-flat. That’s how I started that piece. Sometimes I don’t start with sounds, I think about, say, the ensemble or just a simple concept like what can this ensemble do, or what’s beautiful about this ensemble that I can expose. In this case, I started with the cymbal and then I orchestrated the partials and the harmonics in the cymbal to make a piece for chamber ensemble.
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