Splinter Cells is the second in a sequence of pieces that started with dirty pixels that focus on ideas of roughness and rawness, including a rather “overblown” quality to the writing. The impression is of a musical language struggling under the weight of its own plenitude, both as a reaction to the idea of having too much unified economy of material and as a way of incorporating my love of late-Romantic musical idioms into a context in which their mild cheesiness is made all the more pungent. Underlying every note in this work is a six-note collection (a “splinter”) gathered from the opening of the third movement of Hanspeter Kyburz’s influential work Cells, also for saxophone and ensemble. Throughout this work there are many little “nods” to this seminal piece, as well as to another work that I was obsessed with at the time, the ‘Schwarzer und Roter Tanz’ from Tutuguri by Wolfgang Rihm, a composer who seems to share my love of “over-the-topness”.
Splinter Cells was composed with funding from Creative New Zealand, and was premiered by Lars Mlekusch (saxes) with Stroma, cond. Hamish McKeich in July 2005.