Codex

Programme note

Codex imagines the harpsichord as a manuscript object: a succession of parchment leaves on which gesture, resonance and touch appear as forms of inscription. Its title refers both to a bound collection of pages and to the instrument’s accumulated historical memory. Rather than treating that history as a stylistic prescription, the work uses it as material, pressing the harpsichord’s inherited identity against a contemporary musical language.

The piece unfolds as a set of loosely entwined miniatures that make use of the instrument’s range and timbral possibilities. Pauses behave like spaces between leaves, allowing the performer to alter register, coupling and buff stops; each new page may therefore acquire a different grain, colour or degree of distance. Dynamics function not only as indications of volume, but as prompts for articulation, touch and the projection of particular contours.

Against these inscribed surfaces, passages of fast flurries act as a kind of erasure: text is scraped away between pages, leaving fragments, marks and palimpsestic residue. Material reappears as though partially rubbed out or overwritten. The codex is not read in a single direction; its pages preserve, obscure and transform one another.