NIGHT GARDEN

Night Garden is an essay in precise tuning for five contrabasses. Its technique is at once simple and yet demanding. Every instrument plays only natural harmonics on a single string, different for each (see chart below). The sound should be as pure and ethereal as possible, even when the music grows more agitated. As the title suggests, it should "glow" with a particular luminescence that is idiomatic to the instrument, with its capacity to make higher harmonics sound more strongly than in other strings.