for 4 Windinstruments with same register – 2008, free duration
Ricordi Germany publisher, score in sell: Sy. 3798

dedicated to the Roskam family

Explanation note:
This piece is written for four wind instruments (brass or woodwinds), which share at least two octaves of range in common (in the score, the clefs are not specified but the four musicians must determine which clef they will read (treble, alto, tenor or bass), and it must be the same for all the four musicians. Also, the four instruments must have the same transposition in case of transposing instruments, or must be able to transpose from the score written in C, except for the instruments in Bb or Eb, for which a score is provided.

This piece, made of twenty-six independent sonneries, will be played before or/and after the concert, as the audience arrives or leaves.

The 26 independent sonneries are labeled with letters. The sonneries will be interrupted with pauses of an irregular duration (from 3 to 25 sec.). The sequence of the sonneries as well as the length of these pauses will be determined in advance by the musicians. The formation of a word from this system of letters, with or without semantic meaning, can aid as a mnemonic device. One may repeat the same sonnerie many times, or conversely, it may be omitted.

Three ways to play the piece:
In any cases, the musicians will then be placed outside the concert hall (corridors, garden, parking garage, subway station, etc.).

. The musicians will play from locations that will not be visible to the audience. Optimally, the musicians should be distributed across different locations (so that the Sonneries sound fom everywhere) and will use a synchronisation tool to be rhythmically perfectly synchronized.

. Another possibility is for the musicians to move across the audience, with the score attached to their instrument (with the syncrhonizationsoftware runing on an attached smartphone, or with a wireless headphone).

. In the absence of a synchronization system, which makes it impossible to spatialize the musicians, you will be looking for a hidden place (the concert hall’s dressing room, for example) where the musicians can appear only when they’re playing the cells, and retreat during the pauses.

Synchronisation of the musicians:
A computer software, Maestro, has been made to synchronize the beginnings and the tempi of the sonneries. You can downlaod it here. this consists of two small pieces of software:

. Maestroeditor, to write the list (which can be saved as a p.list for later use) in the desired cell order and with the desired pauses and number of repetitions.

. Maestroplayer is a  visual and audio clicktracks, with view of the score (see below).
The difficulty of synchronization, however, lies not in the software itself, but in the ability of four computers or tablets to stay exactly in sync for music (they are multitask). There are several complex technical solutions in order to succeed.

A simpler solution is to use only one computer or tablet with Maestro, and synchronize the click-track with HF headsets (which are perfectly synchronized), but in this case, only the audio part of Maestro will be used by the three other musicians.