L’anello (the ring) is a piece about sound, space, and the choreographic gestures of the conductor, who is also a soloist. The multifaceted work of Steven Schick inspired the piece. Here, the conductor’s motions mix traditional conducting movements with different gestures and movements created to indicate changes in volume, articulation, and the spatialization of sounds in certain parts of the piece.

The piece’s name suggests not only the positions of the instruments and the conductor on the stage but also the piece’s form, timbre, texture, and pitch content. The soloist is in the middle of the ensemble arrangement as a diamond in a solitaire ring. The sound at the beginning emerges from silence, and at the end, it disappears as the shank of the ring disappears behind the finger as we view it. The soloist, using only high, non-pitched percussion instruments, suggests the multiple facets of a diamond.

In addition, when the soloist moves, playing at different sides of his station, and the ensemble’s sound is spatialized, it suggests how a diamond shines when the ring moves. The entire piece was composed thinking of shapes and movements. The textures were constructed by creating a matrix that distributes pitch, articulation, accentuation, placement, and duration of the rests in particular ways. The composition process started with the soloist’s materials without a clear pitch structure. It moved out into the instrumental groups at his side, where the harmonic content is more significant than at the beginning or end of the piece. There, all instruments play the same note: B at the beginning and E at the end.