Ideal : Reality

Ideal : Reality is a five-minute work for drumset quartet and live processing, written for the Sō Percussion Summer Institute and premiered at Taplin Auditorium, Princeton. The piece sets out to draw the tonal reality locked inside the conventional perception of the drum as the antithesis of pitched sound, using techniques borrowed from tuning systems and the research of Ben Johnston. Some of the basic units of rhythm are the same shapes that pitches take in the physics of polyrhythm; focusing on the relationship between the fifth — represented here by the glockenspiel bars — and the resulting cross-rhythms, the piece stages the interference of an ideal meeting a reality. The mathematical Ideal is carried by the polyrhythms; the Reality arrives as linear, driving rhythm.