Glass Trees

Programme note

Glass Trees is a work for seven players in two movements, Umbral Sand and Lurid Vapour. Scored for flute doubling piccolo and bass flute, B♭ clarinet doubling bass clarinet, bassoon, B♭ trumpet, trombone, cello, double bass with C extension, and two ultrasonic devices shared among the woodwind players, it treats the ensemble as a field of breath, resonance, friction and interference.

The piece begins from almost imperceptible pitchless sibilance, diaphragm pulses, tongue movements and an acousmatic high-frequency pulse, before gradually exposing more tactile instrumental behaviours: percussive attacks, multiphonic flickers, valve and slide vibrations, bow creaks, col legno, harmonic glissandi, buzzing preparations and microtonal beating.

The musical discourse emerges from a notational dialogue between freedom and precision. The conductor shapes gestural contours and alignment while players retain agency over entrances, pauses and degrees of textural prominence.

Across the two movements, sound remains a malleable material in continuous development: breath becomes pulse; pulse becomes distortion; sustained tones fracture into noise, harmonics, tremor and unstable resonance. These transformations propel a dramaturgy of charged acoustic environments and shifting sonic hierarchies—sometimes sparse and exposed, sometimes densely agitated and volatile. Pitch gradually acquires presence until the work culminates in an expansion into a lurid field of resonance, where the ensemble’s full force and the acoustic of the space can finally be felt.