Codex V

Barrett, Richard

About the work

The model for Codex V (and the other pieces which share the Codex title, seven so far) was the situation where a fragmentary or skeletal or barely decipherable musical text, from the distant past, is realised by (contemporary) musicians so as to reconstruct, or imagine, something of the ‘living tradition’ from which these few obscure fragments are perhaps the only musical remains. In Codex V, a highly systematically-constructed ‘solo’ line, which runs throughout the piece but is never actually played as such, is elaborated (‘accompanied’?) in various more or less improvisatory ways by three mixed (but otherwise unspecified) groups of instruments.

First Performance: Spitalfields Festival, CoMA London 2007

Technical notes

Three groups of mixed instruments.

Origin

CoMA Open Score project 2004 commissioned by Diana Burrell, artistic director of Open Score 2004