"Effluvium and Ecstasy" for Flute and Voice

In my compositional practice, particularly in works like Effluvium and Ecstasy for Flute and Voice, I find a profound resonance with Thomas Demand's Processo Grottesco. Demand's meticulous reconstruction of a Mallorcan grotto using 30 tons of grey cardboard, shaped into 900,000 sections, serves as a compelling metaphor for the way I approach musical notation and the interpretive elements of the score.

Demand's installation doesn't merely replicate a natural cave; it reimagines it through the lens of collected ephemera.  Epherma consisting of postcards, books, tour guides, and advertisements offering viewers a layered understanding of the creative process. Similarly, in Effluvium and Ecstasy, I incorporate archival images, typographic fragments, and visual motifs into the score, creating a tapestry that challenges traditional notions of musical notation.

Thomas Demand's Grotto

This approach transforms the score into a visual and interpretive artifact, much like Demand's grotto, which blurs the line between reality and representation. The inclusion of documentary materials alongside the reconstructed grotto allows viewers to explore the evolution of the artwork, mirroring how performers engage with the layered elements of my scores to interpret and realize the music.

Furthermore, the concept of the 'grotesque process' in Demand's work, drawing from the 1500s painting technique 'grottesca,' introduces a provocative and bizarre aesthetic that informs my own exploration of notation. By embedding unconventional symbols and structures within the score, I aim to evoke a sense of mystery and challenge performers to navigate the subterranean depths of musical interpretation.

In essence, both Demand's Processo Grottesco and my Effluvium and Ecstasy serve as investigations into the transformative power of reconstruction, inviting audiences and performers alike to engage with the ephemeral and the enigmatic in art and music.

Performing the Grotto: Interpretive Excavation in Effluvium and Ecstasy

In Effluvium and Ecstasy, the flautist and soprano are not merely executing sounds—they are navigating through a labyrinthine document, one that mirrors the very logic of Demand’s cardboard grotto: a space built from shadows of a space, then flattened into a final image. My score is not an open window onto a musical truth, but a reconstruction {a notation-as-installation} filled with detritus, ambiguity, and re-mapped fragments.

Just as Processo Grottesco invites viewers to explore the gaps between original, source material, and reproduction, the score of Effluvium and Ecstasy compels the performers to act not as interpreters in the traditional sense, but as archaeologists of an unstable sonic terrain.

The Flautist as Topographer of the Grotesque

The flautist is presented with extended techniques notated through visual glyphs embedded in a palimpsest of typographic noise. These glyphs demand a dual fluency in both instrument and interpretive speculation.

In performance, the flautist might encounter a sequence of nested spirals overlaid with cartographic shadings and punctuated by microtext. These aren’t fingerings or pitches, strictly speaking, but they are pressure zones, breath contours, directional eddies. The flautist is asked to:

• Map sonic airflows, much as one might traverse Demand’s paper contours.

• Treat silence as a structural void not absence, but documented emptiness.

• Interpret degraded visual forms as invitations for sonic erosion.

They perform in the grotto, not of it.

The Soprano as Ephemeral Archivist

The soprano, too, is handed not a “part” in the classical sense, but a composite trace of layered speech-events. Some texts are scorched, partially legible, and overwritten. Others emerge from catalog imagery, archival snippets, or are deformed versions of found texts (e.g., tourist captions or museum labels, distorted phonetically).

In one passage, the soprano is instructed to:

• Vocalize a fragmented catalogue entry describing a geological formation, syllable by syllable, with glottal breaks between each.

• Sustain a vowel derived from the Mallorcan grotto’s touristic description, but stretch it into a vocal formant dislocated from speech.

• Overlay her sung material with audible breath, forming a kind of vocal erosion field against the flautist’s dense key-click modulations.

The soprano, like Demand’s viewer, does not reenact a moment—she summons the echo of an image reconstructed from suggestion, not memory.

What This Means for Both Performers

The performers must abandon the idea of completion. The piece is not “solved,” nor is there an ideal performance. Instead:

• Each realization is a photograph of an ephemeral reconstruction, much like Demand’s destroyed models.

• Decisions are often made based on visual texture, rather than musical logic.  It becomes an alignment with typographic density, graphical contour, or even symbolic decay.

• Temporal coordination is not strictly metric; it is environmental. Entrances emerge not from cues, but from sensed proximity to gesture, text, or atmospheric shift.

Performing the Archive of Absence

Just as Demand builds, and then destroys, a space that never existed, only to preserve its ghost as photograph, the performers in Effluvium and Ecstasy embody a musical processo grottesco. They engage with a document that is part score, part excavation site, part hallucinated map.

Each performance becomes a momentary inhabitation of that artificial grotto.  The performance sounding of the constructed absence, where the score is both ruin and blueprint, a place that was never real yet remains permanently marked in the memory of its unfolding.