'Ground Moves' was premiered by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra at PULSAR festival 2016. Seismograf brings an interview with the composer on occasion of his upcoming debut concert, and here Black's first orchestra piece is brought up as an example of his tendency to take tense, sparse ideas or naïve, pure ones and impose elements of chaos upon them. In 'Ground Moves' this can be heard as a steady emergence of symphonic resolution from beneath a surface orchestral weave, Seismograf writes, and James Black explains:
‘I think that’s how the human mind works in general,’ says Black: ‘you have this chattering chaos at surface level, and then you have this deep thought underneath. Something I have taken from Hans is that everything has to be structured, so I’ve become very adept at making number systems. I don’t really leave anything to chance when it comes to details like pitch or instrumentation, and rhythmically I systemize literally everything. In other words I keep the chattering part of my mind busy, then the deep-thought part is free to make bigger decisions about form and poetics or whatever.’
Read the whole interview at Seismograf here.
Listen to 'Ground Moves' here.
James Black: Debut
Wednesday 28 February, 19:30
Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen (DK)
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