Score and parts for hire

The Polish sociologist, philosopher and essayist Zygmunt Bauman coined the concept of ‘liquid modernity’ to describe the fluid and volatile state of today’s society, a world without strong values in which uncertainty weakens the human bonds that were hitherto believed to be firm. In his Liquid Symmetries (2013) Francisco Coll has developed a sound language based upon a principle of permanent uncertainty. Through a succession of truncated beginnings and endings – a constant process of composition, decomposition and recomposition – the work takes on a ‘liquid’ structure, in which everything changes. Brief imitative figures and isorhythmic passages shape the score into a virtuosic continuum. The resultant music does not evoke the ‘individuals’ speaking through instruments – not voices conversing with one another in counterpoint: it is instead an indistinct mass, akin to faceless machinery, which liquefies the contours of things and, ultimately annuls the differences between them.

Antonio Gómez