Airfields by Yannis Kyriakides & musikFabrik

Composition in twelve parts for ensemble and electronics. Performed by musikFabrik. Recorded at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, Amsterdam, 17.02.11.

The history of this piece falls into three stages. In 2008 I was commissioned to write a piece for Veenfabriek’s Siren Orchestra, an ensemble of sirens and noise machines modelled on the instruments of Italian futurist Luigi Russolo and the theoretical writings of Hermann von Helmholtz. Because of the futility of writing too precise pitch material for these instruments, the score took them form of graphic notation. I used satellite images from various IMINT sources and rendered them into electronic soundscapes, using various analysis methods to translate the contours of the aerial maps into sound. I was fascinated by the results, the idea that one could translate an image of a landscape into a musical narrative, seemed an intriguing way of mapping space onto time and then back again. I have often thought of my compositions as a musical environment where one can wander through in a relatively open time scale, so the idea of using a map of a physical space as a direct analogy to a musical score became an interesting starting point for the work. This eventually became ‘Bases’ because most of the images that were rendered were of US military air and naval bases.

The next phase of the piece came from gradually tracing out my own versions of the graphic score, out of curiosity and desire to have a more precise articulation of the sound maps. This resulted in composing fixed pitches and rhythms to the soundscapes. After sketching about half of these into score, I received a commission from Tomoko Mukaiyama and the Seattle Chamber Players for a large-scale work for their Icebreaker V festival in February 2010, and I decided to complete this material for them, and so ‘Satellites’ for 5 instruments and soundtrack grew out of this.
The instrumentalists are put into a metaphorical orbit. The idea was to trace some kind of movement with varying speeds through the sonic landscape, as if they were floating across it. The result being that the material which is played by the musicians, is characterized by differing velocities and rates of change, as if each instrument is orbiting around the material. Harmonies dissolve into one another and the musicians trace the contours of the sonic landscapes as if scanning the world beneath.

A new version of the piece was made for large ensemble in 2011, not as a way of replacing the previous one but out of an idea of adding more depth and perspective to the ensemble. This version ‘airfields’ uses brass placed on the balconies of the concert hall to echo and feedback from the ensemble of 11 remaining musicians on stage. The structure of this work, like its previous incarnation, oscillates between movements for the whole ensemble and movements for particular soloists; violin, bass clarinet, piano, cello, flute, in which the off-stage brass contribute at various times.
I had the opportunity to premiere this version of the piece at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ in my hometown Amsterdam, with Köln based ensemble musikFabrik in February 2011, and the recording presented here is of that performance.

Acknowledgements:

I am grateful to Paul Koek of Veenfabriek, Tomoko Mukaiyama, Elena Dubinets of the Seattle Chamber players for commissioning and performing the piece in its various stages; to all the members of musikFabrik for their helpful input and dedicated interpretation of the work; to Paul Jeukendrup, Daan van Aalst and Dick Lukas for arranging the live recording, and to Riccardo Wanke for his enthusiasm in releasing it on Mazagran.

Yannis Kyriakides, July 2011

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