Chris Swithinbank

some­thing golden in the night rep­re­sents a first at­tempt to trans­form the tra­di­tional con­cert hall con­text through an ab­stract scenog­ra­phy that be­gins to con­struct a new con­text within the frame­work of a clas­si­cal con­cert. A sax­o­phon­ist is ac­com­pa­nied in their per­for­mance by a play of shad­ows com­ing from a sculp­ture, the move­ment of which is con­trolled by a motor in syn­chrony with elec­tronic sounds. In plac­ing the mu­si­cian in di­a­logue with an an­i­mate ob­ject and the ob­ject’s shad­ows, I hope to gen­er­ate an in­ti­mate space within the con­cert hall (on stage) into which the au­di­ence gaze, es­tab­lish­ing a quasi-voyeuris­tic sit­u­a­tion where pre­vi­ously a solo per­for­mance may be seen as an ex­hi­bi­tion­ist, vir­tu­oso com­mu­ni­ca­tion di­rected at the au­di­ence. Of course, this is not only a ques­tion of the vi­sual re­la­tion­ships but is also em­bed­ded in the sound of the work. The be­gin­ning of the work is char­ac­terised by a still, slow focus on a tightly re­stricted set of sounds, the small­ness and fragility of which al­ready in­vite the au­di­ence to recog­nise the sound as dis­tant, as hap­pen­ing else­where. The en­trance of more and more elec­tronic sounds as the work pro­ceeds, in­clud­ing music boxes and dis­tant hum­ming ra­dios, also draws on the evoca­tive na­ture of mov­ing shad­ows and dark­ened rooms, al­low­ing the po­etic imag­i­na­tion to per­haps re­mem­ber the shadow on their child­hood bed­room wall.

some­thing golden in the night (for­merly ti­tled and pre­miered as Schat­ten­spiel) was writ­ten as part of the Cur­sus 1 pro­gramme at IRCAM. Thanks are owed to Em­manuel Fléty for his as­sis­tance with the mo­torised com­po­nent, Jean Lochard for his ac­cel­er­a­tion al­go­rithm and Haruka Inoue for all her time and mu­si­cal con­tri­bu­tions. Also to Adam Maor and Lisa Stre­ich for their tea-mak­ing abil­i­ties and knife skills re­spec­tively.