Written for Aart Strootman and the Danish National Chamber Orchestra under conductor Henrik Vagn Christensen. The world premiere took place on 27 November 2015 and marked the presentation of the biannual Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen honorary prize. In 2016, Westdeutscher Rundfunk commissioned an extension to the work, which was first performed in the new version on 24 April 2016 at Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik, with Aart Strootman and the WDR Symphony Orchestra under Emilio Pomárico.


As in much of Juliana Hodkinson’s music, the piece explores the traditional limits of music: everything, including the electric guitar, is being constantly modified. “The strings of the solo electric guitar are re-rigged and massively detuned and retuned, to achieve an extremely noisy and low bass register, as well as to create meandering microtonal bends and slides. The music, and even the instruments, are under modification the whole time,” the composer writes. Embedded in the score are news headlines from the months when the composer was working on the piece, sonified in the music according to Morse code or converted through other compositional devices. These initiatives “attempt to create a relation between current events, their representations in media and communications, and the material aspects of a musical work,” or rather assume such relations while acknowledging that they are hard to discern. The title comes from Hodkinson and Troup’s chamber opera, Turbulence, where the words are spoken by a pilot at the end of the opera. 

...can modify completely / in this case / not that it will make any difference... was broadcast live by the following radio stations: Danish Radio P2, BBC 3, Switzerland’s SRF 2 Kultur, DeutschlandRadio Kultur, WDR3, and Iceland’s Rás 1.