Kairoscopics
for bass drum, video projection, transducer and objects
2026
for bass drum, video projection, transducer and objects
2026
The work builds upon a broader interest in diagrams as mediators between thought and practice. Diagrams occupy a special place between disciplines: they appear in science, philosophy and arts as ways of rendering processes visible and stabilizing abstract relations. In this sense, a diagram may be understood as a gesture momentarily fixed in order to be examined, shared and eventually reactivated.
Musical notation itself is a spatialization of time: it organizes duration, succession, simultaneity and direction on a surface. Kairoscopics takes this idea as a foundation and presents a composite of figures representing the passage of time itself: lines, directions, rotations, circles, trajectories and horizons.
Throughout the work, successive perspectives of a synthetic object are projected onto the membrane of the bass drum. The instrument becomes simultaneously a surface of projection, inscription and performance. The percussionist is given no separate score: the image on the drum is both the instruction and the field within which gestures take place. As viewpoints rotate, traverse, and reorient the object, various relations between its elements momentarily become perceptible. The sonic aspect of each section is a reduced study of a particular aspect of temporal experience (i.e. event, duration, relation, layering) deduced from a transitory point of view on the instrument.
As the piece progresses, a fundamental question arises: how does a concept of time form at all? Any attempt to understand time requires stabilizing it, projecting it into forms we can perceive "atemporally". Lines, arrows, circles, and spirals make succession and change understandable, yet they exclude and betray what they attempt to capture. A general form of time couldn't be grasped instantly but through a succession of perspectives.
The overall form of the piece is structured as the diagrammatic and musical representation of the synthetic arrow used to represent time itself. What has already occurred in the piece is seen as structured past; the present as transparent and vibrating point of activation and the future as progressively determined through processes of differentiation.
The title Kairoscopics refers to this exploration. The Greek term "kairos" designates not measured time but the opportune moment: a charged interval in which something becomes possible. Combined with the "scopic" notion of perspective, it suggests a succession of temporal windows in which different intelligibilities and audibilities of time briefly come about.
More broadly, a deeper affinity between music and thought appears. Just as a musical form unfolds in time, the formation of concepts also takes place in time. A concept is never given all at once; it emerges gradually through a sequence of partial determinations whose coherence becomes visible only in retrospect. In this sense, music may be understood as a model for thought in general.
performances:
4 + 5.03.2026 / Alti Blächi, Basel
7.03.2026 / Salle des Marchandises, Nyon
17.03.2026 / Cricoteka, Kraków
percussion: Zacarias Maia