viscera (2010)
(for string trio basso)

In viscera, I sought a musical language that could convey poetically the idea of failed or fraught expression. With this choked and stifled sounds, the near-constang leggero furioso texture uses almost cruel force to suppress pitch, which is always struggeling to unfold, to come into being. So there is an urgent need to communicate, to express – yet there is also a voicelessness. Pitches that do manage to puncture through this paradox and break free bear scars: They are unstable and distorted – loud and wild, fragile and enervated, or flickering on the edge of sound and silence. Given the score's virtuosic demands, high information density, and breakneck tempo, the bodies of the musicians mirror this fraught expression as well, as they strive to execute frenetic, constantly changing strings of sonic events. Concretely, the title refers to the dense and complex inner workings of the human body (with oblique references to the historical use of gut strings for these instruments and the place of the premiere, Darmstadt, which contains the German word for 'gut'), but, metaphorically, also to strength – one that could withstand the violence and shuddering that so often initiates emergence.

Mark Marden