kalam

kalam (𒌧) is the term used by the ancient Sumerians to refer to the lands inhabited by their own people. It contrasts with kur (𒆳), which referred both to the mountains surrounding Mesopotamia and to the underworld.

The piece explores these conceptions of the known and the unknown using, on the one hand, Shepard-Risset’s in!nite glissando, which creates the sound illusion of a continuous ascent, and, on the other, Cantor’s function and its property of being uniformly continuous but not absolutely continuous.

These two characteristics—uniform continuity and in!nite ascent— are transferred to the oboe, whose idiomatism places them outside its own kalam, evoking in the process the archaic sounds of the ge-di (𒄀𒁲), the Sumerian version of the aulos and remote origin of the modern oboe.

Producer: Javier Monteverde

Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Javier Monteverde at Estudios Cezanne.