Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

This piece is the second of a series carrying the title 'Encryption'. These pieces are not intended to be performed together - each is a complete entity unto itself and shares no instrumentation with others in the series. Encryption I is for solo flute and Encryption III is for solo piano. (Others are planned for the future.) What they have in common is a shared compositional technique and that's where the encryption comes into play.
In each piece the instrument names are encrypted as musical pitches and (by a slightly more arcane process) as rhythmic patterns and these provide the motivic basis of the work. Therefore the identity of the performing instrument provides - in cypher - the musical material of the whole piece.
In the case of Encryption II the oboe and the four keyboard percussion instruments lend their names to the encryption process and therefore to the fabric of the piece. A process takes place whereby each of these 'identities' is extended into a fuller musical statement after which the four percussion themes coalesce into a single indentity, reducing the total thematic content to just two threads; i.e. oboe and percussion. Then the process is repeated as these two become one and the piece concludes in unity.
Alan Lawrence - June 2003

Work Details

Year: 2001

Instrumentation: Oboe, percussion (4 players).

Duration: 15 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

First performance: by Duncan Tolmie, Isorhythmos Percussion Ensemble — 6 Jun 03. The Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane