Hubert Howe

Cello and Fixed Media

Composer's Note:

In my previous inharmonic fantasies, I have compressed or expanded the components of a sound into various intervals, ranging from two octaves and a fifth to as small as a perfect fourth. While these create quite interesting sounds in higher octaves, they do not work as well for lower sounds. In this work, I employ frequency shifting, which allows the partials to be spread over much wider intervals. The process involves taking the first 24 partials of a tone and shifting them up arithmetically by about the interval of a tritone, preserving the equal distance between the partials but not the ratio between them, so that they are no longer in a harmonic relationship.

The components of each tone are introduced either as a complex envelope, where they each fade in and out over the course of the duration, or are attacked individually and then fade out. These are represented by the instruments designated as "1" and "2" in the score. The order in which the partials enter is related to the harmony of the context in which the notes occur. Different sections of the piece use different numbers of components and different partial sequences.