“Tamburlaine” for twenty -three players

Tamburlaine explores questions of continuity and discontinuity, of cause and contingency, and of genre. Like all my pieces it seeks to create a sense of musical identity that embraces heterogeneity and embodies multiple value systems. Its instrumentation and formal principles reflect these concerns. The large chamber ensemble makes possible an orchestral approach but also encourages the drawing out of smaller subgroups. The subgroups I use vary greatly in size and quality, allowing for a continuum that ranges from passages like the almost symphonic opening to moments of embarrassing intimacy. By employing subgroups with strong style- and genre-associations, the work opens itself up to the contingencies of taste, fashion and history.

The work's form is a kind of parade: a scheme that provides a sense of surface continuity also allows for the unpredictable appearance and disappearance of heterogeneous materials. All of these materials are heard in flux as they approach and pass. Parade form is linear, episodic and non-repetitive; moreover, each sound-structure the form includes possesses its own trajectory, its own organizational and transformational principles, its own kind and degree of presence. Most important perhaps, the parade is a minimally determined framework in which anything can happen (or not happen), and in which an improvisatory approach can govern large-scale organization as readily as it affects local detail.

In order to ensure both a sense of multiplicity and some measure of consistency, I created a scheme in which four structures—like voices in a polyphonic weave—unfold simultaneously throughout the piece. These voices can only be defined in open-ended ways—no voice has exclusive rights to any instrumental configuration, rhythmic technique, intervallic material, and so on. The four voices retain their distinct identities partly because one often hears them change little by little. Such an identity holds fast even though the beginning and end of the transformational process may have almost nothing in common. The piece thus develops a conception of identity based on contiguity and connectedness rather than difference and exclusion—on what William James called “innumerable hangings together” and not on a set of rules about what can and cannot fit.