"Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash": A Score for String Quartet
Introduction: Temporal Structures in Sound
The score for Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash for string quartet is a study in systematic repetition, mathematical structuring, and stark formalism, drawing inspiration from the process-driven mark-making of Hanne Darboven and the clinical yet confrontational aesthetic of Thomas Ruff’s portrait photography. In both Darboven’s obsessive recording of time through numerical systems and Ruff’s forensic depiction of the human face, we find a commitment to accumulation, iteration, and a near-bureaucratic confrontation with form.
By translating these visual and conceptual methodologies into sound, the score functions as an auditory transcription of duration, repetition, and erasure, challenging conventional ideas of development in musical structure.
I. Score as Repetitive Notation: The Darboven Influence
At the heart of this composition lies a notation system built on cumulative repetition, mirroring Darboven’s relentless handwritten numerals and calendar-based sequencing. The score does not unfold in a traditionally teleological manner; instead, it builds in grid-like accumulations of repeated gestures, which function as a sonic equivalent to Darboven’s vast wall installations of copied texts and figures.
Mathematical Structures & Temporal Expansion
Like Darboven’s installations, the music’s structure maps time itself, with the performers tracing through a field of prescribed gestures rather than progressing towards resolution.
Handwriting as Sound: The Ritual of Mark-Making
Each instrument enacts a daily inscription of notes, accumulating in layers of slight variation, akin to the way Darboven’s handwriting accumulated into walls of near-identical pages.
Repeated bowing techniques. Sul ponticello scrapes, harmonic glissandi, and shifting microtonal trills function as the equivalent of pen strokes, obsessively documenting the passage of sonic time.
The material is fixed but mutable, allowing the players to slightly alter their articulations in a manner akin to handwriting inconsistencies within structured repetition.
II. The Ruff Influence: Static Portraits in Sound
Where Darboven’s influence is in the rigid structuring of time, Thomas Ruff’s photography provides a model for the score’s cold, enlarged sonic surfaces. Ruff’s portraits are emotionally neutral yet invasive, forcing an intensified scrutiny of texture, imperfection, and presence.
Musical Surface as Photographic Exposure
The quartet is treated as a single, composite entity, akin to a neutral photographic background upon which subtle variations emerge.
The score utilizes high-resolution timbral focus, exaggerating overtones, bow pressure, and micro-adjustments in vibrato, much like Ruff’s hyper-detailed depictions of skin texture and tonal gradation.
By magnifying these subtle shifts, the composition achieves an uncanny stillness, where the sound is both neutral and overwhelming emerging as a confrontation between objectivity and presence.
Lack of Expressive Depth: The Anti-Narrative Approach
Traditional phrasing, tension-and-release structures, and harmonic motion are largely absent.
The performers’ role is not to convey emotion but to enact presence and to inhabit the material without interpretation.
This lack of psychological depth, in contrast to the density of surface-level detail, is a direct challenge to the listener’s expectations of portraiture in sound.
III. Large-Scale Accumulation & The Aesthetic of Overwhelm
Both Darboven and Ruff use scale as a tool of excess; one through endless pages of numerical inscriptions, the other through gigantic photographic enlargements. Perisetta mirrors this approach in the way it expands static elements into a monumental experience.
Overlapping Layers & The Perception of Stasis
The score eliminates foreground/background distinctions, allowing for a flat auditory plane, similar to Ruff’s uniform lighting that erases narrative depth.
The result is both immersive and alienating. A document of time’s passage without traditional markers of progression.
Perisetta, Barefoot and Dusted with Refinery Ash is an attempt to reconcile the materiality of time, surface, and repetition in a string quartet context. By drawing on Darboven’s obsessive numerical structures and Ruff’s detached yet invasive photographic realism, the score resists narrative and emotional depth, offering instead a neutral yet imposing document of sonic presence. It is a work where the act of playing becomes an act of recording, where music does not progress but inscribes itself onto a durational landscape, moment by moment, until nothing remains but the imprint of repetition.
