zeroPoints

In his orchestral piece zeroPoints Peter Eötvös pursues two central motives which are rooted in his personal memories. Commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra and Pierre Boulez, zeroPoints is above all a tribute to the great composer, conductor and colleague Boulez:
’It is an unusual task, a special honour for a composer-conductor to write music for another composer-conductor. Since the Eighties I have often conducted Boulez’ Domaines, and I still wonder why he begins bar-numbering with 0 instead of the accustomed 1. Out of respect for the master I dared only aim at the interspace between 0 and 1, thus the titles of the movements of zeroPoints run from 0.1, 0.2... to 0.9, without ever reaching the number 1.’

Another motive that Eötvös uses as a basis of this work is the memory of noises and sounds: ’Nostalgic memories bind me to the audio recordings of the Fifties and Sixties – the years of my childhood – which formed and determined my musical thinking in a fundamental way. Technical noise was a natural by-product of recording, of the audio technology of that time. The "tape-noise" imitation at the beginning of zeroPoints derives from the same source – but today, in the age of faultless technology, it had to be produced artificially, using double-bass tremolos. The clarinet signals that start the piece correspond to the 1kHz countdown sinus signals used in film music recordings. This, too, leads to the zero point: 3-2-1-0, and thus music starts from zero...’ (Peter Eötvös, 2001, foreword of the score)