What Rubs Remain

A flute, before it is a flute, is a column of air made to tremble at an edge; a cello is something rubbed, something struck, something that goes on sounding after the hand has left it. What Rubs Remain asks, through Husserl's eidetic variation, what persists in an instrument once everything particular to it has been varied away. Run through five sounding bodies, the variation leaves a few archai they hold in common: friction, impact, air, resonance. The electronics give residue a second meaning: each microphone is split into its tones and what the tones do not explain — breath, scrape, the edge of an attack. Only this residue enters a memory that is empty when the piece begins, and an improvising agent (Somax2) answers the players with it. Across four sections the instruments withdraw one by one, until the machine is left alone with what it kept.

Flute, clarinet in B♭ / bass clarinet, cello, piano (inside, hands only), percussion, and two electronics performers (Max, Somax2, FluCoMa, Jitter; quad and projection). No conductor: a networked clock. Proportional graphic score in 13 panels.