When we did the workshop with Bree and Claire onboard the HMAS Vampire, we were lucky enough to get below deck into a steam room, where the public usually can’t go. This was a pretty amazing space, and the sound that I loved the most that they found in there was the engineering wheels, which rung like bells if hit with the right mallets:

Trying to think of a way to notate these “bells” so that exact pitch wasn’t important, I thought of Morton Feldman’s Intersections scores. In these, notes and duration are shown on a grid, simply in relative pitch (think high, medium and low) and timing and note length (the grid represents the MM, and the squares how long the note goes, from left to right).

An excerpt from Morton Feldman’s Intersection no. 3

Using this approach to notation will mean that Ensemble Offspring’s players can find at least three wheels that they like the sound of, and then hit them in time, relative, but not necessarily “in tune”, mixing musical “composed” elements with industrial, “in-between the notes” pitches.