“#3987 Magic Mauve” classifies an invented color, as in a catalogue of artist’s paints. A synthetic color of which the name and the number id are unlikely. Although, in this case, color refers at the same time to its 14th century musical designation: as harmonic or melodic content, as it is opposed to rhythmical structure or talea.

The work’s harmonic material is derived from the cross-tuning (or scordatura) of a 17-key kalimba celesta, with a view to testing and stretching the limits of the harmonic content both microscopically (through the analysis and composition of timbre in the electronics) and macroscopically (with regard to relations between temperament, harmony and line).

Colors in the more typical sense, that is, as instrumental timbres, are forced inside color, as an harmonic structure.

At the same time, multiples time-structures (“taleas”) and time-qualities (the mechanical time of virtual musical objects, the human time of the interpreter, the semantic time of musical narrative etc.) meet in confrontation, such that this ‘coercion’ becomes audible…