16 instruments and processing

Commission: Lorraine Vaillancourt, NEM

…boundaries, not to withhold but rather to gage progress, to incite challenge…

At the heart of the creative act is the endless search for ideas and perspectives just beyond our view or as yet unknown. At the same time, there is a need to reconcile ideas, methods, and beliefs already within our grasp and understood as tested by time and memory. Horizo is concerned with the boundaries, the edges, the thresholds of this reconciliation, this sought after balance between old and new, between now and the moment just experienced.

A concertino of five instruments drawn from within the full ensemble serve as both soloists and members of a quintet that initiates the main ideas and materials of Horizo. These capsules of sound and time are frozen, recorded to a computer and subsequently reintroduced in new guises and transformations, integrated into the ensemble’s music, subsumed by it, or serve as guides for new musical and expressive directions.

  • Score available at CMC National (bureau à Toronto).
  • Recording: available at SMCQ’s office