live performance at the Villa Massimo Rome, 20 Oct. 2011
Florian Hoelscher, piano

Nocturne was composed as a study of metric modulations in slow tempo. Each new pattern is introduced as a polyrhythm in relation to the currently sounding cycle. In time, its own tempo is allowed to dominate and redefine the perceived pulse. The mathematical relationships of tempi are perceived as simple intervallic expansions and contractions of the flowing passage of time.

Nocturne (for Linda Smith) (1996)

pier (1996)

for any number of ships’ horns operated by air compressors
written by Marc Sabat & John Oswald  for the 
ships of St. John’s Harbour, Newfoundland
premiered at Sound Symposium 1996
duration:  5 minutes




Instructions:

All horns should be operated by air compressors which may conceivably run out of air during the performance, creating timbral changes.

Each ship has a performer and a timekeeper.  Timekeepers co-ordinate the beginning and ending of the piece by radio contact with each other and stopwatch.  During the 5 minute duration of the piece, they indicate the beginning and ending to the performers.

Each performer executes the same instructions at their own tempo, depending on the nature of the individual ship’s horn:

Play 99 short blasts at a steady tempo as fast as possible so each is clearly heard and separated from the others.

Segue immediately to 1 long sustained blast until the 5 minute mark is given.  Sustain even if the air compressor begins to lose pressure.

Pier (1996)

You & Mr Mason (1997)
for 11 pianos and 11 players
with no previous experience required

composed for Sommerfest at the Akademie Schloss Solitude 


“You and Mr Mason” was written for the 1997 Sommerfest celebrations during a residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. There were 11 grand pianos in a corridor of neighboring studios, with doors opening out into a courtyard. Since quite a few of the available players had limited (or no) previous experience, and would not be able to see or 
hear each other while playing, I decided to work with reduced materials—very few notes in each part, coded by color for those who could not read music, co-ordinated by stopwatch time.
 
Walking through the streets of Stuttgart, I loved hearing the microtonal church bells ringing in and out of phase, especially how a new set of bells changed the harmony. Around the same time, I recalled a recent conversation with James Tenney, about modulating between different harmonic series fundamentals sharing one high-pitched common tone (the idea linking Harry Partch’s utonality and otonality). The shifting fields of pitches in this piece are based on this idea, realized within the intonation tolerance of the piano’s historical Equal Temperament, shaded by the spatial and intonational variation of the 11 instruments. The title is a poetic reference to making lines, demarcations.

You & Mr Mason (1997)

live performance by Plainsound Orchestra 15 August 2003
in Reihe 0, Schwarzenberg, Bregenzerwald Austria
Stephen Clarke, Ekkehard Windrich, James Bush

This piece is part of a series of compositions that are based on a systematic documentation 
or cataloguing of a set of possible acoustic circumstances.  The process used in this case is 
based on one possible realization of an instruction from Christian Wolff’s “Burdocks”, in which a performer is invited to make about 511 sounds, each different from the others.  

This number happens to enumerate the set of all possible non-silent combinations of nine 
sounds: (29 - 1).The idea of presenting all combinations from a fixed set of sounds has been translated into a list of chords tuned in Just Intonation. Each chord is made up of pitches from 
the first eight odd partials of the harmonic series over A (1-3-5-7-9-11-13-15). 

These tones are transposed into various octaves within a fixed range of the piano, following a simple cyclic pattern. The 12 pitch-classes available on a piano are retuned in all octaves to a subset of the overtones of 13.78125 Hz (5 octaves below A-441 Hz and 1 octave below the 
lowest key of a standard modern piano), which produce sympathetic resonances depending on 
the type of pedalling used. 

The violin and cello, muted with apartment mutes throughout, sustain various tones from the chords, producing melodic lines. At the same time, the pitches played in the music, the resonances controlled by the pianist, as well as the nonlinear distortion produced in the air and in our ears, are all tuned components of a sustained sub-audio tone which remains constant throughout the duration of the composition.

The music is dedicated to Christina Sabat (1942-1998).

Trio for piano violin cello (1998)

Jean-Philippe Rameau (2012)

3 movements from a 4 movement work for steel string guitar retuned in 72-tone equal temperament, cello and bassoon in Just Intonation.

02a Sabat Surface Slips Away II

02b Sabat Surface Slips Away III

02c Sabat Surface Slips Away IV

Electronic music with optional glissando flute, composed for Erik Drescher.

Swing In Sweetest Summer (Electronic)

Canadian composer Marc Sabat (*1965) is based in Berlin since 1999. He has made pieces for concert and installation settings, drawing inspiration from investigations of the sounding and perception of Just Intonation and of various music traditions — folk, experimental and classical. His pieces are presented and broadcast internationally at festivals of new music including the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Klangspuren Schwaz, MaerzMusik, Huddersfield, Darmstadt, Musica Viva and Carnegie Hall. Scores and artist editions are available from Plainsound Music Edition. Recent recordings include the LP “Les Duresses”, released by care of editions (Berlin) as well as discs on the labels Populist Records (Los Angeles) and World Edition (Köln).

Sabat studied composition, violin and mathematics at the University of Toronto, at the Juilliard School in New York, and at McGill University, as well as working privately with Malcolm Goldstein, James Tenney and Walter Zimmermann. Together with Wolfgang von Schweinitz he has developed the Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation and is a pioneer of music written and performed in extended Just Intonation. He teaches at the Universität der Künste Berlin, and as a guest at the California Institute of the Arts, the Escola Superior in Barcelona, the Janacek Academy in Brno and the Paris Conservatoire. In 2010, he was an artist-in-residence of the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, followed in 2011 by a one year residency at the German Academy in Rome, Villa Massimo.


Sabat studied composition, violin and mathematics at the University of Toronto, at the Juilliard School in New York, and at McGill University, as well as working privately with Malcolm Goldstein, James Tenney and Walter Zimmermann, among many other close colleagues. He teaches at the Universität der Künste Berlin, and has been a guest artist at the California Institute of the Arts, at the Escola Superior in Barcelona and the Paris Conservatoire. In 2010, he was an artist-in-residence of the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, followed in 2011 by a one year residency at the German Academy in Rome, Villa Massimo.


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