large ensemble (12+ players)

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Tramespace is a hybrid word composed of two French words, “trame” (woof, or weft in English), meaning the crosswise threads on a loom over and under which other threads (the warp) are passed to make cloth, and “espace” (meaning space). The metaphorical loom is a context from which the musical materials are woven. Just as each thread is carefully placed and integrated to create a textile, each sound gesture, each musical impulse is threaded with precise intention. As the musical filaments are carefully interlaced – heterogenous, yet collaborating to become one – the surface becomes rich with patterns while depth is made by the multitude of interacting strands. At times, the weave is loosened and a thread becomes entangled, exposing the threads as merely threads just momentarily and no longer as fabric, shifting perspective and seeing things anew, even altered once the yarn becomes rejoined.

In tandem, the concept of space and its elusive quality is something Onishi became interested in during conversations with close friend, composer Mahir Cetiz, most notably regarding the “compositional space” in his work, Départ dans… As space is inexorably tied with time, with an elapsing sense of immediacy and memory, the awareness of physical and metaphysical space is fluid. As music passes with time, it fills a space, interacts with it and leaves it. It makes you aware of the room you are sitting in, yet your sense of inner space has expanded limitlessly. For Onishi, “…it lingers to the territory of the unknown…” and for him, this piece “is, in a sense, an attempt to circumscribe this metaphysical space using the sound that is developed over time.” His work is also informed in part from the philosophical discussion of “self” that is put in the context of the world as a space by Japanese philosopher Shizuteru Ueda in his “Two-Fold Being-in-the-World.”

Tramespace I was commissioned by Gaudeamus Muziekweek as a result of receiving the Gaudeamus Prize in 2011. Tramespace II, still a work in progress, is commissioned by Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris.

Tramespace I and II can be played separately, although playing them together forms a coherent whole as a diptych.

– Program notes by Michelle Lou

Additional Information

Tramespace is a hybrid word composed of two French words, “trame” (woof, or weft in English), meaning the crosswise threads on a loom over and under which other threads (the warp) are passed to make cloth, and “espace” (meaning space). The metaphorical loom is a context from which the musical materials are woven. Just as each thread is carefully placed and integrated to create a textile, each sound gesture, each musical impulse is threaded with precise intention. As the musical filaments are carefully interlaced – heterogenous, yet collaborating to become one – the surface becomes rich with patterns while depth is made by the multitude of interacting strands. At times, the weave is loosened and a thread becomes entangled, exposing the threads as merely threads just momentarily and no longer as fabric, shifting perspective and seeing things anew, even altered once the yarn becomes rejoined.

In tandem, the concept of space and its elusive quality is something Onishi became interested in during conversations with close friend, composer Mahir Cetiz, most notably regarding the “compositional space” in his work, Départ dans… As space is inexorably tied with time, with an elapsing sense of immediacy and memory, the awareness of physical and metaphysical space is fluid. As music passes with time, it fills a space, interacts with it and leaves it. It makes you aware of the room you are sitting in, yet your sense of inner space has expanded limitlessly. For Onishi, “…it lingers to the territory of the unknown…” and for him, this piece “is, in a sense, an attempt to circumscribe this metaphysical space using the sound that is developed over time.” His work is also informed in part from the philosophical discussion of “self” that is put in the context of the world as a space by Japanese philosopher Shizuteru Ueda in his “Two-Fold Being-in-the-World.”

Tramespace I was commissioned by Gaudeamus Muziekweek as a result of receiving the Gaudeamus Prize in 2011. Tramespace II, still a work in progress, is commissioned by Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris.

Tramespace I and II can be played separately, although playing them together forms a coherent whole as a diptych.

– Program notes by Michelle Lou

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This work was written as a part of the Phase 2 of the commissioning project Projet Tremplin by IRCAM and Ensemble Intercontemporain. The work was read and recorded in the morning of April 14, 2012 in Salle de Projection at IRCAM in Paris, France.

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Palinody is a now rare word, derived from the Middle French word, palinodie. The Oxford English Dictionary defines palinody as: “An ode or song in which the author retracts a view or sentiment expressed in a former poem.” Here, the former “composition” refers to my 2008 piece entitled Wound Sky (i.e., past participle of the verb “to wind”), which was a work that I wrote just before coming to New York to start my residency at Columbia.

“Whenever we hear sounds, we are changed. We are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds,” was the maxim that German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen once declared. As my life seems to have changed in these past two years, what I thought I aptly expressed two years ago no longer appeared valid to me. I found it necessary and inevitable, therefore, to destroy the work entirely. I took little of what was salvageable from my Wound Sky, disintegrated it into pieces, and I wrote a new piece over them. In this way, the original context of Wound Sky is lost. In this piece, the destruction of Wound Sky is not represented by the absence of the work, but rather by a collection of subconscious memories whose origins are obscure. However, in this present piece Palinody, the spectators ultimately assimilate those “nomadic” memories in their own terms.

With the apparition of Palinody, the work Wound Sky is hereby withdrawn from my catalogue of works.

Written in the autumn of 2010 for the musicians of the Wet Ink Ensemble, this piece is dedicated to them.

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This is the second commission project with Nishi High School in Hakodate, Japan. Each timpano is surrounded by three percussionists, playing various parts of the instrument or in combination with other small percussion instruments.

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Written for the joint project of Yale School of Music and Royal Academy of Music.

First of the two parts withdrawn, only the second part is extant.