Musique instrumentale d'ensemble (Ensemble instrumental mixte de 10 à 25 instruments)

	
I took my microscope, and put things under it that were actually too big. For years, I’ve been working with increases, with processes of growth or decay. So it was time to put this dramatic strategy itself in the foreground, and apply some tests. Salz consists of 125 increases: waves that are arranged in waves, that are arranged in waves. So gradually, everything gets ever faster and louder. The aim here is a double refraction: the manipulative process of increase is braked back, fragmented, and forced into a rigid, predictable form of organisation. Yet predictability can have an energy that surprises are incapable of. Tension means that one knows what will happen next. 
The sound is stamped by a 32nd-tone Hammond organ (so 192 notes per octave). Initially it just plays a rather slow chord sequence, almost imperceptibly shifting upwards. The presumptuous desire here is to relate all details to one another, in a thematically embedded way. The starting point is my admiration for the musicians of Klangforum Wien (for whom I am now able to write a fifth piece): since I wouldn’t like to disappoint these obliging people, I’m trying to accommodate information in every cleft of the piece. What happens is that I constantly see chaos arising. 125 times, the piece threatens to sink into chaos. It’s its organisation that induces this.
Salz is essential to our lives. But at sea, we die of thirst.
Enno Poppe.