Drowning Glass - For an Unconventional Instrumentation Placed in a Conventional Setting

The conception of this began when I took a visit back to my hometown late 2022 and saw young children playing with

marbles, something I was very fond of when younger.

Since that instance, I always found one way or another to think about the Marbles themselves. The sounds they can make,

their liveliness, their interaction in live spaces, and their natural aspects of chance and improvised nature.

I then bought a giant tub of marbles and experimented over time with them. The traditional notated motifs in this

piece derive from transcribing rhythms that the marbles created when dropped from certain heights.

Much of the soundscape of the notated material is glassy, and ambient in nature. Each musician has a chance to

interact with the marbles in one way or another, whether that be using it on your instrument, rolling them across the

ground, or dropping them from a specific height.

The “Drowning” part of this piece comes from the fact that whenever I interacted with these marbles, their sound would

eventually drown out in the space or they would drown out the silence in space. I translated this within the piece during

moments of “duos” and “solos” for the instrumentalists.

This piece’s goal is to highlight this intricate delicate nature that these glass balls have, and how they interact in these two

worlds that coexist in this piece, the “drowned” and the “un-drowned”.

Recorded in Seoul Korea, 2023.