"The Concerto Grosso continues and expands an inquiry into the nature of musical time which has been on going in my work for several years. In particular I am interested in exploring how musicians negotiate and re-negotiate the basic building blocks of rhythm: pulse, beat, meter and tempo. The notation of the work gives the performers and conductor many choices in the timing of passages, the alignment of events, and the order of phrases. Performers are thus involved in musical decision making generally more associated with composition than performance. This open approach to notation has no generally agreed upon label. It has variously been termed indeterminate (a bit inelegant and imprecise), open (which carries associations from the literary studies and art theory that are not germane), and aleatory (which emphasizes chance without speaking to the ways in which order in the work comes into being). Given these difficulties, I suggest the use of the term 'tychism' as a somewhat antique but highly appropriate term. Tychism is a concept developed by C.S. Peirce to describe the emergence order from chance events. It was appropriated into the first debates around Darwinian evolution, but in its original form the usage was much more general and ontological, a way of understanding the universe at fundamental levels. Peirce's friend and colleague William James perhaps articulated his friend's idea more succinctly, calling tychism "Peirce's suggestion [that] order results from chance-coming."
"In this work in particular, I am interested in how groups of musicians work in consort to bring musical time into being. Drawing on the historical models of the concerto grosso, the work delineates several distinct groupings of performers– the concertino (the collection of soloists), the ripieno (the supporting string ensemble) and the conductor (the point of interface for these groupings). In the first movement, the soloists are presented in turn, playing rhythmically active material against (generally) open and un-pulsed music in the strings. Through much of this movement, there is no shared pulse at all, with the soloists and ripieno moving freely with rough alignment managed by the conductor directly, rather than pulse. In the second movement, a stronger sense of meter emerges, though often the concertino and ripieno do not agree on a core pulse and often run parallel, producing blurry textures which snap back into focus when the two ensembles move back into agreement.
