Glass Hand

Glass Hand – Video, String Quartet (c. 8’)

Commissioned by Isaura String Quartet;
premiered at REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA,
October 2018

Glass Hand from Jules Gimbrone on Vimeo.

Glass Hand is a 4-channel visual video score in which the composer’s notation comprises physical gestures conducted on the surface of a pane of glass. Glass Hand manifests as a type of synesthetic performance, asking of the musicians to interpret the score as it plays projected upon the stage as a composite and on their individual monitors. Gimbrone considers the pane of glass as an embodied intermediary surface functioning both as a gap for (mis)interpretation and/or point of translation and communication. Echoing Gimbrone’s sculptural work with liquid-filled glass vessels, transfusion–to pour over or through–becomes a compositional methodology giving form to sonic variables Pitch, Tempo, Timbre, and Volume by using Color, Movement,Opacity, and Pressure. Gimbrone’s investigation of surfaces relates to an ongoing interest in the phenomenology of resonance–social performativity, identity development, subject/object relationships–all being inherent to the accumulation of layers that are built on materially transparent, fragile, surfaces. Resonance, as a set of conditions or relationships between things, becomes activated and legible through light and sound then complicated through abstraction, perceptual manipulations, and synesthetic translations.