Bone Alphabet by Brian Ferneyhough

Bone Alphabet came about as the result of a request by Steven Schick for a solo work for a group of
instruments small enough to be transportable as part of the performer’s personal luggage when traveling by air. I responded by leaving the precise instruments to be utilised unspecified, other than by requiring each of the seven sound sources selected to be capable of supporting an extremely wide range of dynamics and of having closely similar attack and decay characteristics to the other instruments. An additional constraint was that no two adjacent instruments making up the gamut of possibilities were to be constructed of the same material (so that, for instance, a chinese gong could not be located next to a cow bell).