Downstream

1991 – 92 | for guitar and stereo playback

[ score ]

Both the solo part and the prerecorded material echo the rhythms and spoken sounds of a poem I wrote one summer morning beside a languid stream in the French countryside. Each of the piece’s three movements corresponds to a section of the (now lost) text. The music is permeated by the same aqueous languor conveyed by its poetic model, but the instrumental writing is elaborate and demands virtuosic agility and delicacy from its interpreter. The piece was initially conceived for male voice and guitar; the electroacoustic part, which consists entirely of processed guitar sounds, plays, broadly speaking, the role that the singer would have embodied. 

I composed Downstream for Magnus Andersson in 1991-92 on commission from the Groupe de musique expérimentale de Bourges, in whose Festival Synthèse he premiered it. The electroacoustic part was realized in the studios of the GmeB and the Electronic Music Studio of the Musik-Akademie Basel.