Borderlines (2023)
Instrumentation: s.sax, a.sax, b.sax, tpt, tpt, tbn, b.tbn, e.git., drumset, pnoDuration: c.a. 9'
Premiere: 6. 12. 2023, Divadlo Archa, Jazz Dock Orchestra (Unexpected encounters)
Photo from the concert
This piece was mostly sketched out and written in the summer of 2023 but premiered a few months later in December. This piece was written for an ensemble called "Jazz Dock Orchestra", an ensemble of mostly jazz players, quite familiar with jazz repertoire. However, this concert named "Unexpected Encounters 3" was a third installment of combinations of two worlds - "classical contemporary" composers and jazz players. This posed composers an interesting challenge to write music for professionals who are used to each other and used to improvise. Each of the composers had a completely different approach.
Because at this point I was quite interested in connections of notes based on partials, this piece explores a simple principle of creating microtonal lines within the partials themselves - in technical terms, if you take the first 9 partials (including the fundamental) and order the deviations from 12edo in cents, you're going to get numbers 0, 2, 4, 69, 86, corresponding to partials 1, 3, 9, 7 and 5. This way, when making a microtonal line (with the ordered deviations), by tracing back the fundamentals, we get a series of notes to play in order for this microtonal line to be created. This is an oversimplification but hopefully explains the basic principle.
My absolute favourite part is the ending - the conductor stops conducting, the lights dim, and the players conduct themselves until the end. The ensemble splits into three parts, each playing different chords derived from partial chords built on the note D. An exciting feature I did not expect during the rehearsals and the premiere was how the players started to microtonally tune the chords to themselves, while the piece was written with chromatic pitches only.