Karkas [1981/1983]

For composing Karkas, I used a computer for the first time. My father had an administration company where he worked with large mechanical calculators, printers, punch machines, sorting machines, and from the early 1980s, an IBM mainframe, the first computer on the market that didn’t use tapes but had two drums, each containing seven hard drives. He saw my continuous calculations and one day said that I should do that with a computer instead; not only could they do it incredibly faster than I could by hand, but the calculations were also error-free. That’s when I started delving into the PLI language and wrote my first programs.

Karkas continues where I left off with Bint; instead of two clocks, I now used four.

I tried to manually design a recursive canon structure, which mainly had to regulate the harmony. Just like in Bint, the different clocks in Karkas meet after a certain number of beats, and at those moments, the clocks had to play the same chord, so the faster clock had to revert to an earlier chord from a slower clock; but the series of chords for all clocks had to be strictly canonical. This was the moment when my father recommended the computer to me. Instead of manually designing that canon series, I could now program the principle behind it with the computer, so it would work with all numerical combinations. I did that, and in subsequent works, especially in the cycle Het Gebroken Oor, but also occasionally later on, I gratefully made use of it. I also wrote a simple notation program for a 7-pin printer. Music notation programs did not exist at that time. Part of the percussion section was noted with that. It was quite a task. A treble clef was too large and had to be cut into three parts, which required three print lines.

The piece was only performed twenty years after it was completed, during the Holland Festival in 2002. Then once more at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 2010, as the closing of the Chopin year. That had to do with the video that Dries Verhoeven and I conceived in 2002: a grand piano exploding in slow motion, recorded with a special camera that could shoot 1000 frames per second, then stretched to the length of the piece, an hour, and played backward. It ends with a huge fireball from which the grand piano emerges.

Performers Holland Festival 10 juni 2002: students from the conservatories of The Hague, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam, conducted by Etienne Siebens; sound engineering: Jan Panis.

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