Telemetry Lock
for khaen
1999
8 minutes
After composing pieces for solo khaen and khaen with strings that were precisely notated and through-composed, I sought to reincorporate the improvisational aspect of traditional khaen playing. One strategy of developing a new musical language for khaen that I am still exploring is to take the drone, which is fundamental to the performance style of traditional music, and place it on pitches uncharacteristic of traditional music. This forces me to use non-traditional fingerings and therefore inspires new note combinations and harmonies that I would have otherwise never have considered, just as playing guitar yields harmonies that pianist would rarely deploy. In this piece, the two drones are a minor-seventh apart.
As in my other solos, I endeavor to create a multi-layered musical space while limited to only the fifteen pitches of the khaen. Here there are four parts, drones, a rapid barrage of notes inspired by the saxophone solos of Evan Parker and which gives the piece its title, fragments of melody and flashes of repeated chords.
