Elliott Sharp: Orchestra Carbon - SyndaKit

Elliott Sharp: SyndaKit

I wrote SyndaKit in 1998 for my Ensemble Orchestra Carbon. The piece translates images from biology into music; it creates a constantly changing breeding ground of rhythms and timbres. It has an improvisational character and works with algorithms, but it is not improvisation.

SyndaKit is primarily a changing organism, consisting of 144 composed "cores" on twelve sheets of music, distributed among twelve players. A few simple rules set processes in motion: imitation, addition, recombination, transposition and mutation. These processes are based on models: birds flocking together, African drum choirs, cellular automata (these are mathematical models), hunting packs and recombinant amino acids.

The musicians transform "nuclei" into ostinatos, or they can throw them into the flow of the performance as "objects". The four tones C, G, Ab and A are SyndaKit's center of gravity, all sound events are focused on them. Kernels are composed of either these tones or indefinite pitch sounds. Cores with a certain pitch can be octaved at will. Or you can transpose them, imitating, by any interval you like.

Players may add one of their nuclei to another nucleus being played as an ostinato, creating a new ostinato - but they must not line up their own nuclei before they each join a foreign nucleus that is already common Game flow is, have been attached.

Any player can "blurt out" with short improvised comments at any time and then return to the flow of the game. Such a "burst out" can serve as a starting point for new ostinatos - in this way fresh "genetic material" is brought into play. Individual players can enter or leave the river ad libitum.

Theoretically, SyndaKit could be performed in its entirety without players studying the noted cores first. And a "proper" performance could possibly just consist of unison quarter notes or a single note held for any length of time. Sounds contradictory... but in this organic structure it is primarily a question of creating rhythmic consonances that are constantly developing and changing their form and shape.

Translation: Michael Herrschel