"At Once by Other Ones" (2001-2002) for contrabass & optional interactive electronics

"Suppose I wanted to replace all the words of my language at once by other ones; how could I tell the place where one of the new words belongs?" —Ludwig Wittgenstein

I never wrote proper program notes for this piece; I've just used the above quote. Maybe I'll write them later. For now, I'll substitute a brief explanation of the piece.

The piece deals with two categories of contrabass sounds: those made with the hands and those made with the bow. The bassist has 10 panels of bowed material that deal with different parts of the instrument; these can be arranged in any order. These are interspersed with fixed hand material. Depending on a panel's location in the piece, it will last a different amount of time. As the bowed material is shortened, it begins to sound increasingly like the hand material. The optional interactive electronics use different strategies to map the characteristics of one type of material onto the other.

• mp3 of At Once by Other Ones—performed by Christopher Williams (October 25, 2002: Search Event V: New Music Forum at UCSD)
• pdf of the score
• electronics implemented in Pure Data