Sometimes title comes firs, other times you have a musical image but you do not have the title. Sometimes you discover the musical image, sometimes is the musical image that discovers itself. You, as a composer, in these occasions need to be the translator of that idea.
Concerts as we think today are based in the idea of a nineteenth century concerto, as for example concerto for violin, concerto for piano, concerto for flute, etc., concert that envolve one soloist. But in the Baroque era a concerto it was not this idea at all, they were instead a group of soloists, as for example Bach’s Bandenburg Concertos is all about different soloists together. In the Bandenburg No. 5 in D major there is this section where the harpsichord is playing the accompaniment part but it is also doubling the flute part. This idea of a concerto in which a group of different instrumentalists are all soloists interests me very much and for that reason accommodate Mirroring the voice of time for ensemble was something that I really wanted to do.
The base of the construction of the ensemble comes before even starting composing, and it was decisive for Mirroring the voice of time. It can give you a certainty of what your sonic sound is before starting, so you can mould the ensemble to your musical image.
Although having the idea that you want everyone to have a soloist part/an essential part in the music, the reflection about the ensemble comes also in terms of playability and programming your music. Talking about programming and playability does not seem very artistic or very creative, however for a young composer to have his/her music played it is strongly necessary to think about these two:
My initial idea was to find an ensemble that already existed, in order to, on the one hand, in terms of playability, understand what other composers explored with the sonic result of it; on the other hand, in terms of programming, to try that my music gets played more often. What I meant with these is, if having the same number of instrumentalists, the same number of instruments it would be possible to programme not only my music but also music from other composer already stablished. In Mirroring the voice of time, this ide of programming and playability was crucial before even starting composing, copying the ensemble used by Unsuk Chin in Gougalon (using instead of the mandolin a guitar and instead of two pianists in one piano, two pianists in two pianos) gave me the chance to explore what Chin composed in Gougalon and also to, in the future, be able to programme, in one hour concert, both Gougalon and Mirroring the voice of time, for example.