ink haste

for xiao flute, crotales and piano

Nikolaos-Laonikos Psimikakis-Chalkokondylis

ink haste for xiao flute, crotales and piano

Programme Note
Ink haste was written in response to our involvement with the Materials' Library at King's College, London earlier this year. The material I chose to present to the Material's Library group was a CPU cooler from a computer I found in the street, made entirely out of aluminium. It cools down the processor by having a small contact area with the CPU and absorbing the CPU's heat and transferring it to the rest of its surface (which is increased by having a lot of flaps and ridges), which in turn is transferred to the air which comes in contact with the cooler. I was fascinated by this object because of its very simple concept and design (although it's very difficult to make), because it consists entirely of a single material throughout with no extra mechanisms, and because the function it performs is inherent to its properties (i.e. the property of aluminium of being a very good heat conductor). The instruments I chose are all made of a single material: bamboo (xiao flute) and steel (crotales and the strings of the piano the piano player does not interact with the piano in any other way other than directly with the strings), resulting in three different means of producing sound: vibration of a string, of a body and of the air. There is no score for ink haste the music consists entirely of parts. Each performer has seven pages which they have to perform within a given time frame. The first page is very graphic and open to interpretation, with no music-related symbols; the last page is traditionally notated, with almost no freedom of interpretation. The rest of the pages are in-between open and closed scores, moving from one end to the other. This is a reference to the cooling down function that my material has: the piece moves from very spontaneous, adventurous and unpredictable (for both the players and the audience) to more limited, calm and predictable. The title refers to the visual image of the first pages of the parts, which are the result of spilled ink or random gestures on blank pages trying to get my pens to work, and also to the fact that this piece was written intensely over a short period of time as the deadline was approaching. Last, but not least, ink haste is an anagram of heat sink, which is the official term used to describe this object, thus bearing a reference to the material itself.

xiao flute

crotales

piano