FIVE FRAGMENTS for oboe and sheng

FIVE FRAGMENTS was written for Wu Wei and Ernest Rombout during the Atlas Academy 2012 organized by the Atlas Ensemble in Amsterdam. The basic idea was to blend together the two instruments in a unique organism through the creation of a ‘meta-instrument’ in which the different timbrical features would be totally integrated. The composition is made up of five fragments, as the title says, the first and last of which constitutes the formal frame of the work; the common element is the conciseness and the research of synthesis through an economical choice of the music material and the development reduced to the bare minimum. The linguistic components I have chosen are ‘traditional’ but ‘defunctionalized’ and without any recall to their historical inheritance; they are conceived as ‘objects’, syntactical fragments, smallest building unities in relation only to themselves: the second fragment is composed by a sequence of fifth intervals duplicated on itself, the fourth on harmonic conglomerates deduced from the distribution patterns of the pipes of the sheng and on a basic chromatic scale, the first and the last are built around a multiphonic of the oboe while the third put together an element again gathered from the fingerings of the sheng and from another multiphonic of the oboe. The performance was held during the Open Days of the Academy in the Conservatorium van Amsterdam.