ccxx. PARKER, Evan (1944- )/The Transatlantic Art Ensemble
from: The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles.
"There were not many steps. I had counted them a thousand times, both going up and going down, but the figure has gone from my mind. I have never known whether you should say one with your foot on the sidewalk, two with the following foot on the first step, and so on, or whether the sidewalk shouldn't count. At the top of the steps I fell foul of the same dilemma. In the other direction, I mean from top to bottom, it was the same, the word is not too strong. -- Samuel Beckett, The Expelled
Two tight, time-tested networks of players are connected here. Parker's writing for the ensemble mediates between them, and between the compass points and geographical regions they could be said to represent. The title, Boustrophedon, alludes to this mediation. A Greek word meaning "turning like an ox while ploughing," it was a method of writing ancient manuscripts in which the first line would run from left to right, the second from right to left and so on, as if furrowing a field.
"I wanted to use some of the big chords that Slonimsky talks about," Parker says, 'the mother chord' and the 'grandmother chord' --- all these very big all-interval structures -- primarily to hear what they sounded like."
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