Stefan Thut

*250 copies limited edition* At low tide boats near the shore are no longer carried by the water but rest aground. Only after high tide recurs do they function in the way they are intended to. Boats may touch ground while approaching the shore at unknown depths. This is something to be avoided in order to keep the boat sound and safe. A boat moving towards the shore where the ground comes nearer and nearer was the image for me at the time of writing the score. It became the title of the piece – aground.

With this score the touching of ground is achieved by a rather high frequency taken as a surface to start from. It is this surface which is then being interpreted as a part of a pure fifth, a pure major third, or a harmonic seventh. In other words the journey to lower frequencies happens through relations in low whole numbers. This has many beginnings - in movements going down and up again and then finding a way back to the beginning. Some exercises in this manner were being done at the workshop of the Harmonic Space Orchestra in Berlin when I was visiting in May 2024. Back home I made a selection of various ways for a ground frequency to be reestablished which before only existed in number theory and as a presentiment. The return to the real ground only occurs towards the end of the piece. Before that a variation of grounds is noticeable due to the manifold acoustic and psycho-acoustic phenomena.

Apart from moving in the tonal space in fifths, thirds and sevenths I was curious how to get to remote corners in the row of numbers. The appearing of regular hits of the Clave creates a new situation in the piece for measuring and counting by the ear. However, the measuring at the same time includes the possibility of erring. The activity of equating arithmetical calculation to qualities of sound is not entirely reliable. It makes us find ourselves in that light tension of approaching tuning. At high tide boats are floating on the water – this is where it all begins. In a variety of turns and transitions from high to low and from basic to daring operations, multiple grounds become reachable. At low tide boats rest aground, or, if taken as incidents on the sea, they run aground.