Le “Eight Songs for a Mad King” scritte da Peter Maxwell Davies nel 1969, sono ispirate alla follia senile di re Giorgio III° di Gran Bretagna e a un carillon, tuttora esistente e appartenente a Sir Stephen Runciman, che si racconta venisse usato dal re nella pretesa di insegnare a cantare agli uccelli del parco.
Si tratta in realtà di un monodramma di circa 30 minuti con libretto di Randolf Stow basato su testi dello stesso Giorgio III° (testi qui), pensato per l’attore e cantante sudafricano Roy Hart, baritono dall’enorme estensione vocale (più di 5 ottave) e proprio per questo raramente eseguita in seguito (Roy Hart, morì in un incidente poco dopo la prima).
La partitura è per flauto (+ottavino), clarinetto, violino, violoncello, pianoforte (+clavicembalo, dulcimer), percussioni (+vari fischietti, didjeridu), oltre all’attore protagonista che è l’unico a muoversi liberamente sul palcoscenico, essendo gli altri esecutori rinchiusi in grandi uccelliere.
Nel corso dell’opera, il re dialoga anche individualmente con gli altri strumenti che a volte incarnano le sue allucinazioni: p.es. il flauto diventa la Lady-in-Waiting del terzo brano, mentre il violoncello rappresenta il Tamigi nel brano no. 4 e il percussionista è il custode del re.
Un’opera innovativa nel 1969, anche dal punto di vista grafico, che a tratti incorpora musica di corte dell’epoca.
Nocturnal è uno degli ultimi brani di Edgar Varèse (1883-1965), lasciato incompiuto e terminato dal suo allievo e assistente Chou Wen-chung nel 1968 facendo, a mio avviso, un ottimo lavoro (non si avverte la mano di qualcun altro).
Ecco un estratto delle note di programma.
Nocturnal is a world of sounds remembered and imagined, conjuring up sights and moods now personal, now Dantesque, now enigmatic. Perhaps one should not read too much into a composer’s choice of words, but how, knowing Varèse’s unique career, could one resist wondering about the line, ‘I rise, I always rise after crucifixion’? What about the mocking, threatening, babbling emanations from the chorus, often directed to sound ‘as if from underground’ and ‘harsh’? Then there are the sounds remembered — the liquid beat on the wood block, the shrill whistling of the winds, the tenacious shimmering of the strings — the insistent sound of a mass of shuffling feet, the flourishes of drum beats, the sudden crashing outbursts. A phantasmagorical world? Yes, but as real as Varèse’s own life.
In completing the score … two principles were followed: (1) continuation of some of Varèse’s principal material of the original portion, following suggestions in his cryptic notes; (2) addition of new material from the few more elaborate sketches found, so as to illustrate more fully his ideas for this work and his concepts in the use of vocal sounds. All the details, whenever not specified in the sketches, are worked out according to the original portion or other sketches in which similar situations are found. The original portion ends with the words, ‘dark, dark, dark, asleep, asleep,’ sung by the soprano. This is clearly indicated in the published score. The added portion is purposely kept to the minimum length possible, just enough to include all suitable additional material and to provide structural coherence.
The word alap refers to the opening passage of Raga music. In the music of India, the alap tends to display improvisational materials which relate to the music which will follow, yet it contains a deep expressivity. In the work Grand Alap, the opening passage serves as a kind of ritual offering to all surrounding spirits and is a request for permission to begin the performance. This practice has occurred in the music-making practices of cultures throughout parts of Asia for many centuries, including Cambodia. The subtitle ‘A Window in the Sky’ is a reference to the recent scientific discovery of hundreds of newly found galaxies (with the assistance of the Hubble telescope) and perhaps relates to the expository quality of the work, and its expansiveness.
Grand Alap requires the percussionist to be male and the cellist to be female, as each of them has a vocal part which is both separate and related to their instrumental parts. Each of them is required to articulate certain phonemes as well as to sing. Some of the phonemes used are derivative of the sounds used to communicate percussion techniques in regions of South and Southeast Asia while others resemble words in a few ancient languages. A few words have meaning in the Khmer (Cambodian) language, which derives from Pali and Sanskrit: ‘Soriya’ is the sun, ‘Mekhala’ is the goddess of water, and the words ‘Mehta/Karona’ refer to the concept of greater compassion.
Grand Alap consists of countless fragments strung together like beads on a necklace in a complete circle. Some of these fragments bear distinct references to particular personae. The sections entitled ‘Entering into Trance’ and ‘In Trance’ require that the percussionist execute those fragments while in a kind of altered state, or as if thrown into an unearthly dimension. In the section entitled ‘An Angel Voice’ the cellist is to sing a musical phrase with a pure and balanced expression, as if coming from a heavenly place. ‘Rising On the Seventh Day’ symbolizes a ‘rebirth’ of the soul, which is a reference to traditional Khmer theatre, and ‘Departure of the Angel’ is the very last fragment of the work.
The vocal lines in Grand Alap have numerous functions. While at times they are an integral part of the texture and sonority, they also represent the locus of each musical personae or fragment, which are then strung together, as stated before, in a kind of necklace. Sometimes the vocalizations extend instrumental sounds or vice versa while at other times they are interlocked with instrumental sounds. The role of the voices is also often ‘broken’ and detached from the instrumental activity, allowing for instrumental sound to develop alone at certain moments. Instrumental display is continuous throughout the piece, while the voices can be said to contribute dots and dashes, or curves of expressive colors in a painting which emerge out of the canvas. Here, the surface of the canvas is represented by the ever-present instrumental sonority.
Grand Alap was commissioned by Maya Beiser and Steven Schick and made possible by the commissioning program of Meet the Composer/Reader’s Digest. This work grew out of a series of collaborative sessions between the composer and the commissioning performers.
Chinary Ung was born in 1942 in Cambodia and began studying the clarinet in Phnom Penh. He emigrated to the USA in 1964, finishing his clarinet studies and enrolling in composition at Columbia University.
Graduating in 1974, he turned back to his home country, studying Khmer musical traditions for the next decade.
Since 1995 he has taught at the University of California, San Diego.
About his music he says:
I believe that imagination, expressivity, and emotion evoke a sense of Eastern romanticism in my music that parallels some of the music-making in numerous lands of Asia. Above all, in metaphor, if the Asian aesthetic is represented by the color yellow, and the Western aesthetic is represented by the color blue, then my music is a mixture — or the color green.
Chinary Ung – Grand Alap: A Window in the Sky (1996), per violoncello e percussioni
Iva Casian-Lakos, cello, voice – John Ling, percussion, voice
My note:
C’è una interessante estetica che si va sviluppando in anni relativamente recenti: quella di coloro che hanno assorbito ed elaborato elementi culturali lontani e diversi. È qualcosa che va al di la di quello che il pop etichetta banalmente come world music. Non si tratta semplicemente di piazzare una melodia orientale su un ritmo occidentale o viceversa o ancora di suonare rock con lo shamisen.
Se ascoltate questo brano noterete come l’atmosfera oscilli continuamente fra est e ovest, con la sonorità tipicamente occidentale del violoncello, che a tratti si fa orientale con scale e pedali, le percussioni che stanno ora qui ora là e le voci che sono trattate con emissione molto orientale. È un bel mix, frutto di studio, di idee, non banale e non superficiale.
Personalmente, come atteggiamento (non come musica), mi ricorda un po’ Takemitsu quando faceva affiorare atmosfere tipicamente giapponesi da insiemi strumentali del tutto occidentali.
Ted Norman (1912-1997) era un chitarrista e compositore canadese dotato anche di sense of humour.
Infatti, dopo aver partecipato all’esecuzione del Marteau diretto dallo stesso Boulez, ha prodotto lo schizzo che vedete sotto e che trovate qui in dimensioni originali.
George Crumb – An Idyll for the Misbegotten (1986)
per flauto amplificato e 3 percussioni
Kristen Halay flauto, Brian Scott, W. Sean Wagoner, Tracy Freeze percussioni
I feel that ‘misbegotten’ [trad: figlio illegittimo, bastardo] well describes the fateful and melancholy predicament of the species homo sapiens at the present moment in time. Mankind has become ever more ‘illegitimate’ in the natural world of plants and animals. The ancient sense of brotherhood with all life-forms (so poignantly expressed in the poetry of St. Francis of Assisi) has gradually and relentlessly eroded, and consequently we find ourselves monarchs of a dying world. We share the fervent hope that humankind will embrace anew nature’s ‘moral imperative.’
[George Crumb]
Crumb suggests, “impractically,” that the music be “heard from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August.” (Crumb) Over a slow bass drum tremolo, the flute begins its haunting melody, which over the course of the piece includes quotations of Claude Debussy’s solo flute piece Syrinx and spoken verse by the eighth-century Chinese poet Ssu-K’ung Shu: “The moon goes down. There are shivering birds and withering grasses.” Far from a traditionally peaceful idyll, the music’s energy and dynamics gradually rise and fall, with a sense of desolation throughout.
Dated: New York, July, 1942. Revised October 1942
Instrumentation: 4 performers: pianist; 2 percussionists on muted gongs, tin cans, electric buzzer and tom-toms; one performers who plays a radio or phonograph;
Duration: 12′
Premiere and performer(s): August 1, 1942 at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, performed with the choreography by Merce Cunningham and Jean Erdman
The work was composed in the phraseology of the dance by Cunningham and Erdman. For the first time Cage uses records or radios, incorporating music of other composers in his own works. He suggests music by Dvorak, Beethoven, Sibelius or Shostakovich. Cage describes the work as a suite with a satirical character.
Jean Erdman recalls that for the first performance a ‘tack-piano’ was used (a piano with tumbtacks inserted onto the felt of the hammers). The pianist mutes the strings at times or plays the piano body (as a percussionist).
Black Angels (Images I), quartetto d’archi amplificati di George Crumb, probabilmente l’unico quartetto ispirato alla guerra in Vietnam. È una bella partitura, anche graficamente. I titoli dei movimenti, poi, sono fantastici (mi piace molto il 2.3 “Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura”).
Movements
I. DEPARTURE
Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects
Sounds of Bones and Flutes
Lost Bells
Devil-music
Danse Macabre
II. ABSENCE
Pavana Lachrymae
Threnody II: Black Angels!
Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura
Lost Bells (Echo)
III. RETURN
God-music
Ancient Voices
Ancient Voices (Echo)
Threnody III: Night of the Electric Insects
Program Notes (from the author’s site)
Black Angels (Images I)
Thirteen images from the dark land
Things were turned upside down. There were terifying things in the air … they found their way into Black Angels. – George Crumb, 1990
Black Angels is probably the only quartet to have been inspired by the Vietnam War. The work draws from an arsenal of sounds including shouting, chanting, whistling, whispering, gongs, maracas, and crystal glasses. The score bears two inscriptions: in tempore belli (in time of war) and “Finished on Friday the Thirteenth, March, 1970”.
Black Angels was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world. The numerous quasi-programmatic allusions in the work are therefore symbolic, although the essential polarity — God versus Devil — implies more than a purely metaphysical reality. The image of the “black angel” was a conventional device used by early painters to symbolize the fallen angel.
The underlying structure of Black Angels is a huge arch-like design which is suspended from the three “Threnody” pieces. The work portrays a voyage of the soul. The three stages of this voyage are Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation) and Return (redemption).
The numerological symbolism of Black Angels, while perhaps not immediately perceptible to the ear, is nonetheless quite faithfully reflected in the musical structure. These “magical” relationships are variously expressed; e.g., in terms of length, groupings of single tones, durations, patterns of repetition, etc. An important pitch element in the work — descending E, A, and D-sharp — also symbolizes the fateful numbers 7-13. At certain points in the score there occurs a kind of ritualistic counting in various languages, including German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese and Swahili.
There are several allusions to tonal music in Black Angels: a quotation from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet (in the Pavana Lachrymae and also faintly echoed on the last page of the work); an original Sarabanda, which is stylistically synthetic; the sustained B-major tonality of God-Music; and several references to the Latin sequence Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”). The work abounds in conventional musical symbolisms such as the Diabolus in Musica (the interval of the tritone) and the Trillo Di Diavolo (the “Devil’s Trill”, after Tartini).
The amplification of the stringed instruments in Black Angels is intended to produce a highly surrealistic effect. This surrealism is heightened by the use of certain unusual string effects, e.g., pedal tones (the intensely obscene sounds of the Devil-Music); bowing on the “wrong” side of the strings (to produce the viol-consort effect); trilling on the strings with thimble-capped fingers. The performers also play maracas, tam-tams and water-tuned crystal goblets, the latter played with the bow for the “glass-harmonica” effect in God-Music.
George Crumb – Black Angels (Images I) performed by the Miró Quartet Daniel Ching (violin), Sandy Yamamoto (violin), John Largess (viola), Joshua Gindele (cello)
Un lavoro importante di Crumb sono i quattro libri del Makrokosmos (1972-1974). I primi due libri sono per pianoforte solo (amplificato), mentre il terzo (chiamato anche Music for a Summer Evening) è per due pianoforti e percussioni ed il quarto (noto anche con il titolo Celestial Mechanics) per pianoforte a quattro mani.
Il nome di questo ciclo allude ai sei libri pianistici del Microcosmos di Béla Bartók; come il lavoro di Bartók, il Makrokosmos è costituito da una serie di brevi pezzi dal carattere differenziato. Oltre a quella di Bartók, George Crumb ha riconosciuto in questo ciclo influenze di Claude Debussy, sebbene le tecniche compositive utilizzate siano molto differenti da quelle di entrambi gli autori citati. Il pianoforte viene amplificato e preparato sistemando vari oggetti sulle sue corde; in alcuni momenti il pianista deve cantare o gridare alcune parole mentre sta suonando.
Note di programma dell’autore / Author’s program notes:
The title and format of my Makrokosmos reflect my admiration for two great 20th-century composers of piano music — Béla Bartók and Claude Debussy. I was thinking, of course, of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos and Debussy’s 24 Preludes (a second zodiacal set, Makrokosmos, Volume II, was completed in 1973, thus forming a sequence of 24 “fantasy-pieces”). However, these are purely external associations, and I suspect that the “spiritual impulse” of my music is more akin to the darker side of Chopin, and even to the child-like fantasy of early Schumann.
And then there is always the question of the “larger world” of concepts and ideas which influence the evolution of a composer’s language. While composing Makrokosmos, I was aware of certain recurrent haunting images. At times quite vivid, at times vague and almost subliminal, these images seemed to coalesce around the following several ideas (given in no logical sequence, since there is none): the “magical properties” of music; the problem of the origin of evil; the “timelessness” of time; a sense of the profound ironies of life (so beautifully expressed in the music of Mozart and Mahler); the haunting words of Pascal: “Le silence éternel des espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of infinite space terrifies me”); and these few lines of Rilke: “Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit. Wir alle fallen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält” (“And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We are all falling. And yet there is One who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands”).
Each of the twelve “fantasy-pieces” is associated with a different sign of the zodiac and with the initials of a person born under that sign. I had whimsically wanted to pose an “enigma” with these subscript initials; however, my perspicacious friends quickly identified the Aries of Spring-Fire as David Burge, and the Scorpio of The Phantom Gondolier as myself.
Il primo libro, del 1972, ha come sottotitolo “Twelve fantasy pieces after the Zodiac” e infatti i movimenti sono ispirati ai segni zodiacali.
Potete ascoltarlo tutto o selezionare i singoli movimenti riportati sotto:
Part 1: 00:09 – Primeval Sounds (Genesis 1), Cancer 04:26 – Proteus, Pisces 05:44 – Pastorale (From the Kingdom of Atlantis, сa. 10,000 B.C.), Taurus 07:51 – Crucifixus [Symbol], Capricorn
Part 2: 10:25 – The Phantom Gondolier, Scorpio 13:12 – Night-Spell 1, Sagittarius 17:00 – Music of Shadows (for Aeolian Harp), Libra 19:50 – The Magic Circle of Infinity [Symbol], Leo
Part 3: 21:16 – The Abyss of Time, Virgo 23:46 – Spring Fire, Aries 25:31 – Dream Images (Love-Death Music), Gemini 29:40 – Spiral Galaxy [Symbol], Aquarius
Described by The New Yorker as “a vibrantly broad-minded new-music group,” Opus 21 features works by composers from many different genres, including contemporary classical, jazz, pop, and world music, as well as those whose works fall in the hard-to-define categories in between. The ensemble was founded by composer Richard Adams and gave its debut performance at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City in Spring 2003. Opus 21 has since established itself as a truly innovative new music group, and has revamped the traditional concert-going experience by presenting side by side a diversity of art music and crossover works geared toward audiences with eclectic, wide-ranging musical tastes.
Comprised of virtuoso performers from diverse musical circles, Opus 21 is capable of performing works by composers from many different genres. Its programming has ranged from the contemporary classical works of William Bolcom, John Harbison, and Steve Reich, to the jazz compositions of Dave Brubeck and Fred Hersch; from the art rock music of Frank Zappa to a collaborative performance with legendary Motown pianist Joe Hunter.
The goal of Opus 21 is to create a collaborative venue for performers, composers, and audiences whose interests extend beyond a single type of music. Its programs seek to increase public awareness and understanding of art music in the twenty-first century, introduce the public to works it might not otherwise hear, and build bridges between audiences of different musical backgrounds. The group also maintains an open call for scores in order to be able to present the music of both established and emerging composers. In all its activities, Opus 21 is committed to the proposition that great music is without boundaries.
Opus 21 is an independent, not-for-profit performing arts organization.
Site: opus21.org
Finalmente, sul solito YouTube, c’è qualche novità.
Abbiamo qui un breve estratto di musica per piano di Helmut Lachenmann, compositore tedesco vivente, già allievo di Nono e Stockhausen, il cui lavoro viene spesso definito “musica concreta strumentale” per le sonorità materiche che crea, spesso anche con strumenti non del tutto ortodossi.
Qui abbiamo un breve saggio della sua ricerca sonora sul pianoforte. In questi due brevi brani, tratti da “Ein Kinderspiel” (sette piccoli pezzi per piano) del 1980, sfrutta ampiamente le risonanze create dal pedale e da cluster di tasti premuti e lasciati senza smorzatori grazie al pedale tonale.
I brani sono il num. 1 (Hänschen klein) e il num. 7 (Schattentanz).
A mio avviso l’esecuzione potrebbe essere un po’ più accurata: nel primo brano qualche acciaccatura non si sente proprio, ma Wolfgang Behrens non è un pianista professionista e comunque la sua performance è sufficientemente intensa.
Wolfgang Behrens, international commentator and author, gives a monumental performance of this contemporary work, performed in Lilienfeld, Austria, in front of a live audience. Complete with short introduction (German language).
[Notes from YouTube by kunzeo]
The work is “Ein Kinderspiel” (seven little pieces for piano) composed in 1980.
Wolfgang Behrens plays pieces 1 (Hänschen klein) and 7 (Schattentanz) only.
