spás & domhan

in development · spatial granular instrument and visualiser, Max/MSP and Jitter · 2026

James Tenney wrote In a Large, Open Space in Berlin in 1994, for twelve or more sustaining instruments spread through a space the audience can walk around. Each player holds a quiet pitch for 30 to 60 seconds, pauses, then chooses another from the first 32 harmonics of a low F, with lower instruments near the centre and higher ones around the edges. The piece lasts as long as the performance or installation.

Bob Gilmore calls it a pivotal work. In Tenney’s earlier harmonic-series pieces the partials enter one by one from the bottom up; here the whole series is available throughout, so the fundamental no longer anchors the harmony and the dense upper partials can take over. The same approach to pitch became the basis of his Spectrum series.

In this realisation, 32 granular voices take the place of the players, one on each harmonic and all made from a single piano tone. They are tuned as exact ratios, so they land precisely on Tenney’s cent deviations. Each voice sounds for about half a minute and then returns or rests at random, so around half the series is heard at any moment, while the voices turn slowly round the room in opposite directions.

Domhan (Irish for ‘world’) is a visualiser for the realisation, still in development. Each of the 32 voices appears as a thread of dust standing in a dark room, low harmonics near the centre and high ones near the edge, as Tenney asks of the players. A thread takes the shape of a string vibrating on its own harmonic, with one loop for the fundamental and thirty-two for the highest, and it brightens and fades as its voice sounds and rests, shedding dust that drifts upwards and trails behind it as it circles. The floor keeps faint traces of where the voices have been, and a single slow camera wanders among them, turning towards wherever the sound is. At times the floor curls up into a small globe, and the camera skims its surface or draws back to see the whole world at once. Domhan takes its information directly from Spás, so each performance draws a different picture.

The realisation was first performed at the first <open jack> concert at Brunel University London in December 2023. Spás rebuilds it in Max as an instrument for new pieces, with up to 64 voices on anything from stereo to an eight-speaker ring.

Sources: James Tenney, In a Large, Open Space (score, Berlin, 1994; Frog Peak Music). Bob Gilmore, liner notes to James Tenney: Spectrum Pieces, The Barton Workshop (New World Records 80692, 2009). Further reading: Robert Wannamaker, The Music of James Tenney, Volume 1: Contexts and Paradigms (University of Illinois Press, 2021), section 11.2.