Topophony

Topophony, premiered in the 2015 Tectonics Festival in Glasgow

Topophony focuses on two research questions: (1) how might improvising soloists be involved in music that also involves a composed score for orchestra, and (2) how might sum and difference tones determine the structure of such a score?

Fox developed an autonomous compositional structure for the orchestral music which connects a series of harmonic spectra and their inversions by sum and difference tones. This structure also accommodates layers of chance operations, so that a spectra from across the work may be deposited in other spectra.

Such a structure can necessarily only be achieved through an extended compositional process and so Fox decided that the role of the improvising musicians should be to propose a different approach to time: to adopt John Stevens's term, a 'spontaneous' composition. The score prescribes no more for them than an instruction that they should not rehearse with the orchestra.