For the past two nights I’ve been sitting in my studio, obsessively scrutinizing Jonny Greenwood’s magnificently bleak score for There Will be Blood. The first time I heard the shrill syncopation of Prospectors Arrive, the centrepiece of the work, it immediately reminded me of a project I came across last year that I had intended to write about here on Serial Consign.

The above image is the score for two movements of Circalles, a 2007 composition by Martijn Tellinga, a Netherlands based sound artist and electroacoustic musician. Circalles is Tellinga’s second experiment with what he refers to as “Compositional Objects”, a term that resonates with his clinical manipulation of the clusters of modulating tones that populate these works. If the graphical representation of the work doesn’t make it clear how overtly spatial the composition is, it should be noted that the piece was originally prepared for presentation in an 8-channel environment (a stereo excerpt is available on Tellinga’s site).

I’m quite impressed with the correspondence between these score/graphs and the experience of listening to the work, beyond that I am also curious about the extremely architectonic language Tellinga uses to describe these projects. A choice moment from the statement for Node, the piece that preceded Circalles:

Manifest as the compositional undercurrent and categorical architecture, to compose becomes to interpret and articulate musically evocative and aesthetic form that is induced by these structural formations: the extraction of the particulars and the exploration of their structural interdependency.

Nothing sets my heart aflutter more than dispassionate music writing! I guess I can file “Compositional Objects” in my music-thinking toolkit alongside Sound Blocks and Unit Structures.

Be sure to check out Tellinga’s site as he has a provocative body of recordings and installations worth examining. [blogged by Greg Smith on Serial Consign]