Works » By Title » T » Tracers (4:22 / 1988)

“Tracers” is conceived as electronic chamber music for a small ensemble consisting of a ‘soloist’ and a ‘ripenio group’. The soloist is given monophonic material—by turns lyrical or virtuosic—on an ‘instruments’ whose mutable identity derives from sampled and synthetic woodwind and brass sounds. The ripenio group is made up of synthetic plucked, percussive, and sustaining instruments, and usually has the role of supporting and underlining the soloist's statements. A pseudo-reverberation technique is used frequently in this piece (most prominently in the second section): a short note is prolonged by a much softer, slowly decaying sound with less harmonic spectrum. Such sustaining sound is a ‘trace’ left behind by a previous event. The title of the work suggest an analogy between this sonic effect and the light trails left behind by tracer bullets. JD