Eight cellos in a circle. The audience can sit around the octet, or even inside the circle. The cellists start to play, and the resulting music spirals around like a moving object.
8 is part of a series of works that started with Timber for six percussionists playing amplified simantras, and includes Rushes for seven bassoonists and Amplified for four electric guitarists. Each of these works is meant to induce a quasi-meditative, almost ecstatic state, in the listener as well as the performer. The series for like-instruments is meant to be played seamlessly and grow to encompass an entire day.
The innovation in this piece is that the sound travels around the circle in both directions. If you are in the middle of the circle, you can hear the dimensionality and perspective of the sound clearly. If you put on headphones and listen closely to the recording, you can hear the bass notes traveling in space independently of the melody line. Each cellist plays both the melody and the bass, switching back and forth in a choreography of musical roles.
I think of this perspective of sound a bit like moving from two-dimensional art to three-dimensional art. Sound isn’t a flat line — now it takes on multiple roles in space and time. It is a sculpture of three-dimensions. I picked the title 8 because the number is a beautiful rounded gliding symbol that looks like the cellos when they play together.
