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Towards the zeroPoints
I wrote this orchestral piece on commission for the London Symphony Orchestra
and Pierre Boulez in 2000. It is an unusual task, a special honour for
a composer-conductor to write music for another composer-conductor.
Since the eighties I have often conducted Boulez´ Domaines,
and I still wonder why he begins bar-numbering with O instead of the accustomed
1. Out of respect for the master I dared only aim at the interspace between
O and 1, thus the titles of the movements run from 0.1, 0.2, ... to 0.9,
without ever reaching the number 1.
zeroPoints has other personal associations as well. Nostalgic memories
bind me to the audio recordings of the fifties and sixties - the years
of my childhood - which formed and determined my musical thinking in a
fundamental way. Technical noise was a natural by-product of recording,
of the audio technology of that time. These sound-memories appear in several
of my works - for example, the hissing and crackling of old LPs at the
end of the movements of Atlantis. The "tape-noise" imitation
at the beginning of zeroPoints derives from the same source - but
today, in the age of faultless technology, it had to be produced artificially,
using double-bass tremolos. The clarinet signals that start the piece
correspond to the 1kHz countdown sinus signals used in film music recordings.
This, too, leads to the zero point: 3-2-1-0, and thus music starts from
zero...
Peter Eötvös
Programme note by Paul Griffiths
This is music for a new age (if not New Age music), music of initiations.
«Since the 1980s«, the composer has said, «I have conducted Domaines by
Pierre Boulez and have always been deeply impressed by his "figure zero"
in the score. In zeroPoints I composed several "zero figures" and stopped
before reaching the "figure I". The topical importance of this piece is
quite obvious: a chain of beginnings, of successive starting moments,
of overtures - in order to leave the zero point of the new millennium
in a rather different way, suggesting only which direction it might take.«
There are eight zero points, of which the first begins as a 1kHz beep
on E flat clarinet and rapidly develops through loud, vivid gestures into
a dance. This freezes to leave a chorale in low and very low wind instruments
(not counted as a start: perhaps a premature ending), after which comes
a bubbling up to a fast, loud, angular inception from strings and percussion,
with occasional staccato chords from the wind. When this is over, it recommences
as it had before, except that this time what develops is a moto perpetuo
for wind and percussion with string interruptions. Suddenly brass and
tam-tams, fortissimo, start the fourth inauguration, which is taken over
by breezy music, quieter and quieter. The fifth opening - complex-textured,
fantastical and short - is in the treble register. The sixth is for chiming
percussion over slow-moving low chords. The seventh is kicked off by the
beeps again, but faster and leading in another direction, towards music
of tremolandos, trills and outbursts. The final outset brings a reinjection
of activity from piano, harps and percussion, leading to a race to the
finish - a race the composer can be presumed to have won by completing
his score just four days before the end of the 1900s.