Tarantelle II

About

Tarantelle II for solo cello was written in 2002 for the Belgian cellist Arne Deforce and was premiered in the Huddersfield Music Festival in the same year. It was my original conception to compose a piece that avoided using the instrument in any traditional sense, hence the predomination of extended performance techniques. These techniques were then organised in a hierarchical fashion and treated as a sort of internal pulse of gesture and texture. The register, the density of notes, and the dynamics were pre-compositional elements, though not systematic. The use of vocalising near the middle of the work marks a point where the emotional demands of the work move outside the capabilities of the instrument, a bifurcation point, as I call it, a point at which the level of order has reached its maximum, where the music must either change direction or destroy itself.

Jeroen Speak