Empherion | retrograde motion

the diapason for four performers | 2018

timeframe 36 mins | 4/4 | 55 bpm

The inaugural work in the instrumental installation series features the premier appearance of a unique and astonishingly sculptural instrument... the diapason.

Aptly named for its ability to produce grand swelling bursts of harmonies, the diapason features fifty-four musical glasses tuned to the 53-tone just-intonation hyperchromatic scale.

In this work the diapason is configured in a linear formation, resembling a wall of sound that the audience can move freely around. Audience members can create their own personal journeys with the sonic flux within the immersive spatiotemporal environment.

This experience is both unfamiliar and immediate. Sonics infuse, oscillate, and reflect off bodily surfaces, forming spatial realities energized by simultaneous temporal trajectories and dynamics. Time is experienced as domain.

Vibrations and resonations from the continuously shifting pitch patterns can produce incredible intensities, creating zones of indeterminacy between the self and the other.

The clarity of the close tonal relations, fused with the delicate sound of sustained glass, develop ethereally pulsing beating patterns and psychoacoustics.

At any given time, four performers sound this extensive instrument as a homogeneous entity. Multiple eNSembLe members step-in and out from the playing face of the diapason to maintain an uninterrupted presentation that can be sustained over long durations.

The approach to composition utilizes LSN’s method of tonal revolution. Sequences of intervallic relations that cycle and recur for eternity. In Empherion the dense 7-tone chromatic clusters dissipate to reveal seductively pure minor triads. The playful boundaries of consonance and dissonance dissolve.

There are no beginnings or endings to proceedings. The work relentlessly continues its drive onwards from the point it was previously paused. It suggests an entity that is at once both endlessly searching and resolutely in stasis.

Empherion is presented as a medium to develop alternative notions of temporality, enrich given modes of perception, and intensify what it might mean to be contemporaneous to one’s present. The work brings into play a mode of experiencing and conceptualizing motion that is fundamentally at odds with the intoxicating visions of acceleration.

Sociotemporal concerns are at the core of this work. Empherion is a world with its own ritualistic procession. It offers time and space to alleviate our ever-growing crisis of temporal fragmentation, asking an audience to pause in precious contemplation to reclaim notions of duration and vastness.

Two versions of Empherion exist, differentiated by the prograde and retrograde labels. Time can flow both forwards and backwards. These allow for two distinctly separate experiences.