Archivi categoria: Strumentale

Musica strumentale accademica

Freeman Études

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John Cage, Freeman Études for solo violin (1977). A piece whose form is due to a set of misunderstanding.

In 1977 Cage was approached by Betty Freeman, who asked him to compose a set of etudes for violinist Paul Zukofsky (who would, at around the same time, also help Cage with work on the violin transcription of Cheap Imitation). Cage decided to model the work on his earlier set of etudes for piano, Études Australes. That work was a set of 32 etudes, 4 books of 8 études each, and composed using controlled chance by means of star charts and, as was usual for Cage, the I Ching. Zukofsky asked Cage for music that would be notated in a conventional manner, which he assumed Cage was returning to in Études Australes, and as precise as possible. Cage understood the request literally and proceeded to create compositions which would have so many details that it would be almost impossible to perform them.

In 1980 Cage abandoned the cycle, partly because Zukofsky attested that the pieces were unplayable. The first seventeen études were completed, though, and Books I and II (Études 1-16) were published and performed (the first performance of Books I and II was done by János Négyesy in 1984 in Turin, Italy). Violinist Irvine Arditti expressed an interest in the work and, by summer 1988, was able to perform it at an even faster tempo than indicated in the score, thus proving that the music was, in fact playable. Arditti continued to practice the études, aiming at an even faster speed, apparently misreading Cage’s indication in the score to play every measure in “as short a time-length as his virtuosity permits”, in which Cage simply meant that the duration is different for each performer. Inspired by the fact that the music was playable, Cage decided to complete the cycle, which he finally did in 1990 with the help of James Pritchett, who assisted the composer in reconstructing the method used to compose the works (which was required, because Cage himself forgot the details after 10 years of not working on the piece). The first complete performance of all Études (1-32) was given by Irvine Arditti in Zurich in June 1991. Négyesy also performed the last two books of the Etudes in the same year in Ferrara, Italy. [wikipedia]

Daphne of the Dunes

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Daphne of the Dunes, by Harry Partch, is here recorded for the first time live. Originally the sound track for Madeline Tourtelot’s film Windsong, Partch recorded it alone, by the process of overdubbing. The film, a modern rendering of the ancient myth of Daphne and Apollo, is a classic of the integration between visuals and sound. Partch explains his approach to the score:

“The music, in effect, is a collage of sounds. The film technique of fairly fast cuts is here translated into musical terms. The sudden shifts represent nature symbols of the film, as used for a dramatic purpose: dead tree, driftwood, falling sand, blowing tumbleweed, flying gulls, wriggling snakes, waving grasses.”

Melodic material is short, haunting, and reoccurs motivically. Arpeggiated harmonic texture contrasts melodic sections. Meter is ever changing, almost measure for measure, with pulse sub-divisions of five, seven, and nine common. A trio of the Bass Marimba, Boo. and Diamond Marimba written in 31/16 meter is structured with 5 unequal beats per measure, the beats sub-divided into sixteenths of 5-5-7-9-5. A duet of the Boo and Harmonic Canon is written in a polymeter of 4/4-7/4 over 4/8-7/8. – Notes by Danlee Mitchell

The instruments heard in this recording:

DAPHNE OF THE DUNES

Adapted Viola
Spoils of War
Kithara II
Gourd Tree
Surrogate Kithara
Diamond Marimba
Harmonic Canons II and III
Boo (Bamboo Marimba)
Chromelodeon I
Bass Marimba
Cloud-Chamber Bowls
Pre-recorded Tape
(Note: No more than four instruments are used simultaneously.)

Rain Tree Sketch

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Toru Takemitsu: “Rain Tree Sketch” (1982) – Roger Woodward, piano.

Di Takemitsu abbiamo già parlato. anche perché, sebbene non sia un compositore fondamentale per la musica occidentale (anche se è un personaggio chiave nel suo paese), mi piace. Il suo è uno strano caso: quello di un autore che riesce ad esprimere l’animo orientale utilizzando un linguaggio così lontano dall’oriente come è quello della musica contemporanea occidentale. Ne risulta un’atmosfera che non è né occidentale né orientale, ma conserva dei tratti di entrambe le culture.

L’origine di questo brano per pianoforte solo risale ad un’altra opera di Takemitsu: Rain Tree, per trio di percussioni, del 1981. Quest’ultima, a sua volta, si ispira a una novella di Kenzaburo Oe in cui è descritto un albero con molte piccole foglie, in grado di trattenere l’acqua della pioggia mattutina, tanto da rilasciarla gradualmente durante il giorno, cosicché, anche se il temporale è passato, sotto quell’albero piove (頭のいい雨の木, racconto del 1980 non tradotto; il titolo significa L’intelligente albero della pioggia).

Rain Tree Sketch è fortamente influenzato da Messiaen, compositore che Takemitsu ha sempre amato, tanto da dedicargli un Rain Tree Sketch II dopo aver appreso della sua morte.

Qui Takemitsu usa i modi a trasposizione limitata del compositore francese per definire le altezze. Dinamiche e accenti, così come la pedalizzazione, sono precisamente notati al fine di creare una varietà di sfumature e di risonanze.

Feldman – For Franz Kline

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I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important. What the American painter Franz Kline (1910-62) said about his paintings – brusque, black brush gestures on a white background – can be applied equally to Morton Feldman’s compositions. Composition means defining sound space, and this is done just as much with the “black” of the notes as, ex negativo, with the “white” silence, the absence of sound. In its reduction of sound elements, its new balance of sound and not-sound, Feldman’s music attains the magical, floating quality that the composer admired in the early – nonfigurative – paintings of his painter-friend Philip Guston (1913-80): the complete absence of gravity of a painting that is not confined to a painting space but rather existing somewhere in the space between the canvas and ourselves, as Feldman once wrote. Again and again, Feldman noted that the illusion of stasis in his scores could only be understood in the context of his intensive engagement with the visual arts: Stasis, as it is utilized in painting, is not traditionally part of the apparatus of music. […] The degrees of stasis found in a [Mark] Rothko or Guston were perhaps the most significant elements that I brought to my music from painting.

Thus, unlike the graph pieces, the intervals in the sextet For Franz Kline are precisely determined, though the coordination of the sounds is not: The duration of each sound is chosen by the performer, as it says in the foreword to the score. The orientation points on this floating sound canvas are given by recurring phenomena like an unchanging violoncello arpeggio and the b-f#”’ interval that is struck seven times by the piano. If in this piece the uncoordinated simultaneity of sounds is the focus, then in De Kooning (1963) – yet another acoustic homage to a painter – and in Four Instruments (1965), which has similar instrumentation, Feldman is working with the contrast of simultaneous and successive sound events – coordinated chords and loose chains of isolated events. In the case of the latter, a performer is supposed to choose his entrance such that the previous note has not yet faded out: the temporal canvas shouldn’t have any rips in it. Feldman’s balancing act between determinacy and indeterminacy becomes apparent in the seemingly hairsplitting details of the notation: in De Kooning rhythmically free, unbarred passages containing successions of sounds and simultaneous events are interposed with measures of rests with precise indications of tempo (!) – the white is no less important than the black (to return to Franz Kline) and is more precisely structured than the “application of the paint”.
[Peter Niklas Wilson, excerpt]

For italian readers:

Chi legge l’italiano può riferirsi anche a questo saggio di Gianmario Borio da cui traggo questa illuminante dichiarazione dello stesso Feldman:

Il mio interesse per la superficie è il tema della mia musica. In questo senso le mie composizioni non sono affatto ‘composizioni’. Si potrebbe paragonarle a una tela temporale. Dipingo questa tela con colori musicali. Ho imparato che quanto più si compone o costruisce, tanto più si impedisce a una temporalità ancora indisturbata di diventare la metafora per il controllo della musica. Entrambi i concetti, tempo e spazio, sono stati impiegati nella musica e nelle arti figurative come in matematica, letteratura, filosofia e scienza. […] Al mio lavoro preferisco pensare così: tra le categorie. Tra tempo e spazio. Tra pittura e musica. Tra costruzione della musica e la sua superficie.

 

Hosokawa Toshio

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cover“Music,” says Toshio Hosokawa, “is the place where notes and silence meet.” This identifies his aesthetic concept as a genuinely Japanese one. It is found both in Japanese landscape painting and in the music, such as the courtly gagaku, in which audible sound always stands in relation to nonsound, i.e. to silence. In their rhythmic proportions Hosokawa’s compositions are oriented around the breathing methods of Zen meditation, with their very slow breathing in and very slow breathing out: “Each breath contains life and death, death and life.”

Hosokawa Toshio (細川俊夫) è nato nel 1955 a Hiroshima. Ha studiato composizione in Europa, a Berlino e Friburgo con Isang Yong e Klaus Huber.

Di lui conoscevo solo Circulation Ocean per orchestra. Poi ho trovato questi pezzi per fisarmonica e shō (un organo a fiato tipicamente asiatico; esiste in varie fogge dall’India alla Cina; vedi wikipedia).

Alcuni di essi, come quello che potrete ascoltare, derivano da brani tradizionali del Gagaku, altri sono stati composti da Hosokawa, ma tutti sono modellati su un ritmo lentissimo, con i suoni dei due strumenti, quasi sempre nel registro acuto, che diventano praticamente indistinguibili.

Crumb: Zeitgeist

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George Crumb completed the final revisions for Zeitgeist (Six Tableaux for Two Amplified Pianos, Book I) in 1989. The work is approximately twenty-eight minutes in duration. It was commissioned by the Degenhardt-Kent piano duet. The first performance took place at the Charles Ives Festival in Duisburg, Germany in 1988.

After that. the composer reworked the piece to his liking. Like the rest of the Crumb catalog, this work includes enigmatic sounds and titles for the movements, such as “The Realm of Morpheus (” … the inner eye of dreams”).” The extended techniques involves the players reaching into the piano to attack the strings directly in order to achieve specific timbres that would not otherwise be available from without.

Like many of the composer’s earlier works, elements of the work suggest a coherent and exotic belief system or world view in all its eccentricities. Like his Makrokosmos series for amplified piano(s) in the 1970s, the listener is often drawn to the poetic allusions as potential clues to unlocking the arcane secrets of the composer’s mind.

The sound suggests some very concrete ideology or mystic purpose behind his clear yet unique musical formations. Webern had his naturalist Catholicism; Crumb’s point of departure is anybody’s guess. Part of its enduring interest is its lack of posturing. Scriabin, for example, reveled in the role of the eccentric, mystic genius, and played it up. Satie did something similar, though in a more modern and self-stylized way that was grounded in the Rosicrucians. It was less of a romantic cliché than was the hackneyed persona of his Russian peer.

Crumb has all the interior components of a similarly mystical artistic personality but none of the mannerisms or apparent affiliations. He is the anchor of his own spirit, and nothing else resembles his art, with the exception of a plethora of imitators.

When listening to a work such as Zeitgeist, being a world famous artist does not sound preoccupying to the composer. There is compassion to his music that does reflect back upon him as a leader of any wounded aesthetic congregation, as if he does not regard himself as the vital part of an equation consisting of listener, performer, and composer.

Above all, Crumb’s music is American. More precisely, it is nocturnal, pastoral Americana of the highest caliber, revealing a deeply compassionate, inquisitive, and independent imagination. A work such as Zeitgeist does not have more in common with the work of most composers from the United States than it does with the Europeans, with the exception of Charles Ives.

There is little in the scores themselves that verify this connection, but both demonstrate a relationship to the land that is difficult to pin down but easily recognized. Crumb uses fewer indigenous references than Ives, though the Zeitgeist’s fifth movement contains bits of an Appalachian folk song. It could be said that both composers felt less bound to music history than other composers; neither man sounds determined to either break with tradition or serve it.

The music simply is, and that is a rare quality. Even if the listener accepts these rather speculative conjectures, questions remain. Why Zeitgeist? What is the deeper meaning of its movements’ individual titles? It is the apparent importance of these questions that proves that the music is engaging. Many listeners are rarely satisfied to know a piece works. The rigor of Boulez’s syntax has everything to do with why the music works, and one can detect what is working by recognizing its nature, if not its particulars. Crumb’s music remains a mystery, a beautiful one, even with repeated listening.
[All Music Guide]

Excerpts: I have already published a post about the 3rd mov. (Monochord) here. Now go listen to the 4th and 6th.

George Crumb – Zeitgeist (Six Tableaux for Two Amplified Pianos, Book I)

The Carrillo 1/16 Tone Piano

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piano 1/16 di tonopiano 1/16 di tonoQuesto, che a prima vista sembra un pianoforte normale (cliccare l’immagine per ingrandire), è in realtà accordato a 16mi di tono.

Sì. Al posto dei normali 2 semitoni, ci sono 16 suddivisioni. Di conseguenza, fra un Do e un Do#, che di solito sono contigui, qui troviamo ben 7 tasti.

La cosa è evidente ingrandendo (click) l’immagine a destra, in cui si vede chiaramente l’intervallo fra un fa (f) e un fa# (fis).

Questo strumento microtonale è costruito dalla Sauter rifacendosi alle teorie del messicano Julian Carrillo (1875 – 1965) che, nel 1895, iniziò a occuparsi di accordature microtonali. Nel 1925 ideò un sistema di notazione e fondò un ensemble che eseguiva brani microtonali insieme a Stokowski, con il quale andò in tour negli anni ’30.

Nel 1940, dopo aver depositato i brevetti di almeno 15 pianoforti microtonali, contattò la Sauter che gli costruì alcuni prototipi presentati, nel 1958, all’Expo di Bruxelles. Oggi due suoi pianoforti, accordati risp. a 1/3 e 1/16 di tono, si trovano al Conservatorio di Parigi. Altri sono a Nizza e a Mexico City.

Il piano a 1/16 di tono è accordato in modo che l’intervallo di quinta corrisponda a un semitono. Di conseguenza, l’intera tastiera copre circa una ottava, il che è sicuramente un limite. Sarebbe interessante pensare a un gruppo di 6/8 strumenti di questo tipo accordati su ottave diverse (ma mi viene un brivido immaginando la fattura dell’accordatore).

Il suono si può ascoltare in un disco da cui vi presento due estratti. Nel primo è subito evidente la peculiarità dello strumento. Val la pena di raccontare che, quando l’ho ascoltato senza sapere niente, ho subito pensato a un pianoforte elaborato digitalmente e mi sembrava interessante dal punto di vista sonoro. Solo quando ho avuto il disco mi sono reso conto che in realtà era uno strumento naturale. Il secondo, invece, non punta immediatamente sull’effetto sonoro. Alla prima nota, sembra un pianoforte normale, ma, dopo pochi accordi, chi ha un orecchio musicale si chiede cosa diavolo stia accadendo (è un po’ spiazzante, in effetti).

Il disco si intitola The Carrillo 1/16 Tone Piano (edition zeitklang, si trova per es. alla Naxos Music Library o a ClassicsOnline)

Fürst Igor, Strawinsky

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Mauricio Kagel – Fürst Igor, Strawinsky (1982)
for bass voice, English horn, French horn, tuba, viola and two percussionists

“Fürst Igor, Strawinsky” was commissioned for the Biennale in Venice on the occasion of the centenary of Stravinsky’s birth. It received its premiere performance in the church on the cemetery-island San Michele, where Stravinsky is buried. As hinted in Kagel’s note for the Biennale programme, the sacred, theatrical ambience of this location was a lasting source of inspiration to the composer, who is especially susceptible to spectular sites. However, it proved impossible to carry out Kagel’s original vision of a funeral procession of gondolas transporting the audience to the performance: a thunderstorm erupted at precisely the wrong moment, bringing this cortege to nought. All that remained was the concert in the cemetery chapel.

The piece is scored for a chamber ensemble of bass voice, English horn, French horn, tuba, viola and two percussionists. The instruments lie in the middle and low registers, creating a plush, darkening sound. Besides the conventional percussion instruments, there is also a series of unusual sound-producing devices of indefinite pitch such as iron chains, cocoanut shells, the roaring of lions, wooden planks, an anvil, ratchets and metal tubs. These too have largely a muffled timbre. Kagel – who once referred to timbre as the “paramount material” of a work – here proceeds from a precisely conceived sound-image with associations related to the meaning of the composition. This sound-image is expressed not only in the choice of instruments, but also in the numerous performance instructions included in the score with the aim of making the composer’s intentions as unambiguous as possible.

The text derives from Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor”. Apart from a few repetitions to heighten the expression and a cut required for the sake of compression, the composer retains the whole of the text to Igor’s aria in Act 2, in which the captive Prince sings of his despair at his own fate and that of prostrate Russia. A comparison of Kagel’s setting and Borodin’s original, however revealing of Kagel’s methods, cannot be undertaken here. However, we can at least give a rough sketch of the way in which the picture of Igor changes in this re-composition. In Borodin’s work the Prince, though imprisoned, is still in possession of his traits as a ruler, while Kagel’s work reduces him to a complainer who has sacrificed, if not his dignity, at least any sense of his station. He gives free rein to his feelings in a Lamento with pronounced elements of self-castigation; ultimately, his deep despair borders on insanity. This is apparent, for example, in a key passage beginning with the words “geschändet ist mein Ruhm” (my fame has been desecrated), to which Kagel devotes three times as much time as Borodin, and also in the dynamic and expressive climax of the work, just after the half-way point, where the soloist, at the words “und dafür gibt man mir die Schuld” (and I am held guilty of this), is told to break out into “desperate, distorted laughter”. In the long crescendo which precedes this climax the voice part, which had previously been notated precisely, is rendered only in approximate pitch-curves – the inner turmoil bursts the form.

Although this piece is unusually expressive by Kagel’s standards, it cannot simply be pigeon-holed as an “expressive composition”. Kagel’s espressivo capsizes into the grotesque. One sign of this is the nagging, crazed, laughing sounds required of the instruments; another is the direction to the soloist during the preceding crescendo to be “excessively dramatic”, and Kagel’s helpful suggestion that he try to caricature classical Japanese theatre. Seriousness and irony, tragedy and ridiculousness merge in this paradoxical piece, and Kagel makes use of the shifting expression like a mask behind which lie his feelings, now hidden, now exposed. It is not only in the pun of the title, in the neo-classical figures such as scalar passages and parallel 7th chords, but also in this masquerade that Kagel reveals his spiritual affinity with the secretive dedicatee of his piece.

Max Nyffeler (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)

Mauricio Kagel: Speech delivered on 5 October 1982 in the Chiesa di San Michele in Isola, located in San Michele Cemetery, Venice, on the occasion of the world premiere of “Fürst Igor, Strawinsky”.

Dear Friends and Strangers,

The news of Stravinsky’s burial in Venice gave me pause at the time to consider whether a touch of the master’s irony might also be buried in this wish of his. He was so fond of the damp – especially of that kind which is surrounded by glass – that it must have given him untold pleasure to have found his final resting place in this unique city where dampness is ever-present. We, too, who honour his memory today in our jovial manner, should take satisfaction in his decision: Stravinsky is ideally preserved in Venice, and forever within easy reach of one of the most crucial necessities of his former daily existence.

And yet – what ambiguity!

For it was precisely in the dryness, the objectivity of his music that Stravinsky – that grandseigneur of the mind and body, never content unless food and service were of the highest calibre – discovered that dimension which enabled him to turn his eye inward with such infinite profundity. His works are living documents of an apparent dichotomy. Passion and computation, unfettered inspiration and rational ingenuity, the sacred and the heathen – all mutually fertilize each other to produce an oeuvre which is well described by several expressions from the musicians’ lingua franca :sempre con passione ma senza rubato; con molta tenerezza ma non piangendo; con piacere, mai a piacere; musica pratica ma non tanto, musica poetica al piu possibile, musica viva da capo al fine.

For me, it is of course a great distinction to honour Stravinsky on this occasion and in this public forum. I belong to a generation of composers who were left with the unpleasant legacy of a family feud to which, pro or contra, we had in fact nothing new to contribute. The choice posited in Schoenberg’s canon “Tonal oder Atonal” has long, indeed has always been a question of sensibility and intelligent application rather than a hard and fast principle. Today, we no longer bother our heads by confusing a method of composition with the aesthetic of craftsmanship. I hope this will remain so in music history for a long time to come.

Stravinsky had much to offer all of us who practice music as a mental discipline. For this reason, we composers – who view the possibility of musical expression as a confirmation for many things that make our lives worth living – are very much in his debt. The very existence of a classical composer – particularly (sarcasm notwithstanding) a “classical modern” composer – is a clear challenge to anyone dedicated to the discovery of new, present worlds of music. It is my firm hope that my “Fürst Igor, Strawinsky” will prove to our honoured forebear that a goodly portion of his ‘attitude and doctrine consisted nor merely of contradictions and opposites, but also of a high-minded twinkling of the eye. In this sense my work is intended as an homage, without ambiguity: senza doppio (colpo) di lingua.

[text from ANABlog]

Threnody

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Questo brano è ben noto ai cultori di musica contemporanea, ma lo proponiamo per la sua importanza storica. Il testo è tratto da wikipedia inglese (nella vers. italiana non c’è).

Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (Tren ofiarom Hiroszimy in Polish) is a musical composition for 52 string instruments, composed in 1960 by Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933), which took third prize at the Grzegorz Fitelberg Composers’ Competition in Katowice in 1960. The piece swiftly attracted interest around the world and made its young composer famous.

The piece-originally called 8’37” (at times also 8’26”)-applies the sonoristic technique and rigors of specific counterpoint to an ensemble of strings treated unconventionally in terms of tone production. Penderecki later said “It existed only in my imagination, in a somewhat abstract way.” When he heard an actual performance, “I was struck by the emotional charge of the work…I searched for associations and, in the end, I decided to dedicate it to the Hiroshima victims”. Tadeusz Zielinski made a similar point, writing in 1961, “While reading the score, one may admire Penderecki’s inventiveness and coloristic ingeniousness. Yet one cannot rightly evaluate the Threnody until it has been listened to, for only then does one face the amazing fact: all these effects have turned out to serve as a pretext to conceive a profound and dramatic work of art!” The piece tends to leave an impression both solemn and catastrophic, earning its classification as a threnody. On October 12, 1964, Penderecki wrote, “Let the Threnody express my firm belief that the sacrifice of Hiroshima will never be forgotten and lost.”

The piece’s unorthodox, largely symbol-based score directs the musicians to play at various vague points in their range or to concentrate on certain textural effects, and they are directed to play on the wrong side of the bridge, or to slap the body of the instrument. Penderecki sought to heighten the effects of traditional chromaticism by using “hypertonality”-composing in quarter tones-to make dissonance more prominent than it would be in traditional tonality. Another unusual aspect of Threnody is Penderecki’s expressive use of total serialism. The piece includes an “invisible canon,” in 36 voices, an overall musical texture that is more important than the individual notes, making it a leading example of sound mass composition. As a whole, Threnody constitutes one of the most extensive elaborations on the tone cluster.

I 4 princìpi d’Irlanda

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cardewNegli anni ’70, Cornelius Cardew, fino ad allora uno dei più importanti compositori inglesi, pioniere dell’utilizzo di partiture grafiche e dell’improvvisazione, assistente di Stockhausen dal 1958 al 1960, ebbe una improvvisa conversione politica al Comunismo (per la precisione aderì al Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist)) che lo portò a condannare lo sperimentalismo come elitista (att.ne: non etilista), a scrivere il suo famoso libello “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism” e a scrivere musica per le masse, ideologicamente orientata, come questa:

Four Principles on Ireland – C. Cardew, pianoforte

Potete trovare vari brani del Cardew post conversione in questa pagina di UbuWeb.