for orchestra

Commissioned by SWR / Donaueschinger Musiktage

A few short bars from the Intermezzo of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Seventh Symphony provide the entire material for this composition. Through the “sampling” of this score fragment, its musical gesture is frozen: it becomes an “animated still life” (Lauren Berlant), an image that slowly drifts by. The material is extremely reduced, yet never exactly identical. The gesture appears in fragments, presented from countless different perspectives. Only the logic of digital processes is capable of achieving such a precision of cuts within the sample, whose artifacts are translated into complex, displaced rhythms and ornamental variety. This careful transcription of digital artifacts is an attempt to approach a perspective of machine listening. 

Each bar is a cut. The result is a continuity that is dialectically dependent on discontinuities. Peter Osborne, in Anywhere or Not at All, refers to Gaston Bachelard: “‘Psychic continuity is not given but made.’ And it is made out of the temporal structure of the relations between acts: ‘What has most duration is what is best at starting itself up all over again.’” In other words: The deepest continuity is paradoxically that which continually restarts or renews itself.

Sunday, 19 October 2025 — 17:00
Donaueschinger Musiktage — Closing Concert

SWR Symphony Orchestra
Elena Schwarz — conductor

The deepest continuity is paradoxically that which continually restarts or renews itself.

I was trained in tradition, yet I stepped beyond its walls. Sound is my language, not to decorate but to liberate. Composer, performer, and listener — one fire, three sparks, inseparable.

I write and compose to uncover what is hidden: the truth buried beneath power, the dignity of the ordinary, the current of awareness that flows through all.

I belong to no authority, only to sound, to truth, to the silence from which all begins. My work is not mastery, but remembrance — a manifesto in every note, every word, every breath.

I am a composer of the 21st century: a studio artist. The studio is my forge, my battlefield, my sanctuary. Machines hum like choirs, circuits burn like torches, cables twist like roots in the earth. Tradition breaks open in this fire — the score turns to light, the instrument becomes the world itself.

To be a studio artist is to seize sound at its rawest, to sculpt electricity and breath as one, to summon the invisible power that belongs to all. Here music is not bound by walls, not enslaved by profit, not tamed by form. It is free, untouchable, unending — a living flame for the century that is ours.

Vincent Eoppolo (Ioppolo) is an American composer from Wilmington, Delaware. Initially trained as both a Classical and Jazz guitarist, Eoppolo began composing and recording electronic music in the early 1980’s shortly after the development of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) and the introduction of affordable home computers and recording equipment. During the 1980-90’s Eoppolo’s fixed media compositions were regularly featured on university new music radio programs in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania region. Additionally, Eoppolo’s works received recognition in music publications Keyboard Magazine and Computer Music Journal. In recent years, Eoppolo’s fixed media works have been presented at the New York City Electro-Acoustic Music Festival, Mise_En Place New Music Festival in Brooklyn, Utopie Sonore in Nantes, France and De Natura Sonorum in Rome, Italy. Eoppolo’s compositions have been released by Moscow based independent music label Meticulous Midgets and his works are regularly featured on new music radio and internet programs throughout Europe and North America.

Eoppolo’s music is available on all major streaming platforms such as Spotify, ITunes, YouTube and Amazon as well as Soundcloud.

Composer, piano player, audio guy, a human being(?)

I like to work texturally, incorporate processes and create a sound experience. My former coding background inspires me to develop harmony and other aspects of music.

Klaatu barada nikto
No Gods, No Masters
No Hope, No Fear
△ Less is More ▽

The deepest continuity is paradoxically that which continually restarts or renews itself.

Laure M. Hiendl