Commande d’État" of the French Ministère de la Culture, Paris.
Premiered at Saint-Merri Paris, Festvial Extensions by La Muse en circuit, and Festival Les Musiques, GMEM Marseille, France.
KRAFFT will be released on CD and LP vinyl in June 2020
KRAFFT for orchestra was composed in 2016 as a commission of the French State, and was premiered in Paris and Marseille, France. The composition has a similar kind of metric structure as String Quartet No.3: all instruments play in rhythmic unison throughout. The subject of KRAFFT is power and force: KRAFFT is an ironic-onomatopoetic wrong spelling of the German term “Kraft”, meaning “power” or “force”. Due to the maximal minimalism of the music, the listener should feel exposed to a sonic undertow. The notion of huge power and force is often connected to the existence of clandestine and unknown rules controlling the world around us; something is happening, but we do not know exactly what, when or how.
KRAFFT enforces textural listening as “an unwinding strip of 'texture': just listen to that; not to its various strands as such, not to one single strand, but to it as a whole, an unwinding ribbon, varying as it goes in width, in colour, in depth, in thickness, in weight, in character, but always a unity.“[Wood R. (1942) Psychology and Musical Texture, in: The Musical Times, Vol. 83, No.1191, 140-141.]
KRAFFT is composed with the help of the computer program TTM (Textural Transformation Machine TTM is part of Reinhold Friedl’s Ph.D. at Goldsmiths University London 2019), developed by the composer to sculpture texture transformations with the help of sophisticated random processes. It has been programmed by Sukandar Kartadinata.