asymptotic freedom

Chris DENCH
Born 1953, London, England

asymptotic freedom

guitar solo

asymptotic freedom takes its name from the strong nuclear force that holds the quarks together in pairs and trios in bosons and nucleons; this force is weakest when the quarks are closest together--they are asymptotically free. Similarly, the material in my piece is globally strict but locally loose, and is based on the logarithms of the gematric values for the letters in its title. The paradigm is that of variation-form, and this is true at more than one structural level--some of the variations are themselves sets of microvariations, most notably the (excerptable) Section V. All of the nine variations scan through a series of twelve pseudo-tonalities, and each has its own unique harmonic sequence. These variations fall into three larger architectures, Sections I to IV, V and VI, and VII to IX. The symmetry of this architecture is enriched by three slow sections, two between the larger architectures, and the third between Sections V and VI, at the core of the piece.

It is an axiom of the human condition that all freedom is, at best, asymptotic.

Programme note © Chris DENCH