Archivi categoria: Musica

Eleven Echoes of Autumn

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George Crumb – Eleven Echoes of Autumn (1966) for violin, alto flute, clarinet, and piano.

Eleven Echoes of Autumn was composed during the spring of 1966 for the Aeolian Chamber Players (on commission from Bowdoin College). The eleven pieces constituting the work are performed without interruption:

  1. Echo 1. Fantastico
  2. Echo 2. Languidamente, quasi lontano (“hauntingly”)
  3. Echo 3. Prestissimo
  4. Echo 4. Con bravura
  5. Echo 5. Cadenza I (for Alto Flute)
  6. Echo 6. Cadenza II (for Violin)
  7. Echo 7. Cadenza III (for Clarinet)
  8. Echo 8. Feroce, violento
  9. Echo 9. Serenamente, quasi lontano (“hauntingly”)
  10. Echo 10. Senza misura (“gently undulating”)
  11. Echo 11. Adagio (“like a prayer”)

Each of the echoes exploits certain timbral possibilities of the instruments. For example, echo 1 (for piano alone) is based entirely on the 5th partial harmonic, ehco 2 on violin harmonics in combination with 7th partial harmonics produced on the piano (by drawing a piece of hard rubber along the strings). A delicate aura of sympathetic vibrations emerges in echoes 3 and 4, produced in the latter case by alto flute and clarinet playing into the piano (close to the strings). At the conclusion of the work the violinist achieves a mournful, fragile timbre by playing with the bow hair completely slack.

The most important generative element of Eleven Echoes is the “bell motif” — a quintuplet figure based on the whole-tone interval — which is heard at the beginning of the work. This diatonic figure appears in a variety of rhythmic guises, and frequently in a highly chromatic context.

Each of the eleven pieces has its own expressive character, at times overlaid by quasi-obbligato music of contrasting character, e.g., the “wind music” of the alto flute and clarinet in echo 2 or the “distant mandolin music” of the violin in echo 3. The larger expressive curve of the work is arch-like: a gradual growth of intensity to a climactic point (echo 8), followed by a gradual collapse.

Although Eleven Echoes has certain programmatic implications for the composer, it is enough for the listener to infer the significance of the motto-quote from Federico García Lorca: “… y los arcos rotos donde sufre el tiempo” (“… and the broken arches where time suffers”). These words are softly intoned as a preface to each of the three cadenza (echoes 5-7) and the image “broken arches” is represented visually in the notation of the music which underlies the cadenzas.

Textures

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Di Toru Takemitsu, vi presento questo delizioso Textures del 1964, recuperato da un vecchio vinile.

In questo brano, l’orchestra di 73 elementi è divisa in due gruppi uguali, piazzati da parti opposte rispetto al pianoforte, sistemato in posizione centrale. Questo espediente, coadiuvato dalla scrittura, serve ad ottenere un marcato effetto stereofonico.

La scrittura, inoltre, è solistica fino al livello del singolo esecutore per creare tessiture sonore elaborate e cangianti.

  • Toru Takemitsu – Textures (1964), per orchestra

Musica di Jean Dubuffet

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dubuffetNon è un errore di stampa. Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), scultore e pittore francese di fama mondiale, ha scritto anche della musica. Più che scritto, però, bisognerebbe usare il termine “realizzato”, trattandosi di musica concreta, in parte di origine strumentale, della quale non esiste alcuna partitura.

Oltretutto, lo stesso Dubuffet dichiara:

I find that true music should not be written, that all written music is a false music, that the musical notation which has been adopted in the west, with its notes on the staves and its twelve notes per octave, is a very poor notation which does not permit to notate the sounds and only allows the making of a totally specious music which has nothing to do with true music. It is impossible to write true music, except with a stylus on the wax, and this is what they do now in recordings.
This is a way of writing and the only one that’s proper to music.

Il suo metodo compositivo, infatti, consisteva nell’improvvisare liberamente con diversi strumenti occidentali e orientali, nonché con oggetti trovati, registrando il tutto, per passare, poi, a una fase di montaggio usando vari registratori e un mixer.

In realtà, Dubuffet aveva studiato musica da giovane, ma poi non l’aveva mai praticata o studiata con continuità. La sua attenzione era stata risvegliata, alla fine del 1960, da una serie di improvvisazioni fatte per divertimento con l’amico Asger Jorn. Ma poi la passione si era risvegliata al punto che

I transformed a room in my house into a music workshop and in the periods between our get-togethers with Asger Jorn I became a one-man band, playing each of my fifty-odd instruments in turn. Thanks to my tape recorder I was able to play each part successively on the same tape and have the machine play everything back simultaneously.

E poi

The subsequent recordings are the result of two diverging approaches which I hesitated between and which are probably both apparent in at least some pieces. The first was an attempt to produce music with, a very human touch, in other words, which expressed people’s moods and their drives as well as the sounds, the general hubbub and the sonorous backdrop of our everyday lives, the noises to which we are so closely connected and, although we don’t realize it, have probably endeared themselves to us and which we would be hard put to do without. There is an osmosis between this permanent music which carries us along and the music we ourselves express; they go together to form the specific music which can be considered as a human beings. Deep down I like to think of this music as music we make, in contrast to another very different music, which greatly stimulates my thoughts and which I call music we listen to. The latter is completely foreign to us and our natural tendencies; it is not human at all and could lead us to hear (or imagine) sounds which would be produced by the elements themselves, independent of human intervention.

Dubuffet dichiara anche:

In my music I wanted to place myself in the position of a man of fifty thousand years ago, a man who ignores everything about western music and invents a music for himself without any reference, without any discipline, without anything that would prevent him to express himself freely and for his own good pleasure.

Da queste improvvisazioni sono nati due dischi che potete trovare in formato flac su AGP74 e AGP79.

Intanto alcuni estratti:

The Beatles: Rock Band

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Doveva succedere prima o poi. I Beatles sono finiti in un videogame. Realizzato da MTV Games, sarà rilasciato in settembre. Alla conferenza di presentazione si sono riuniti tutti i detentori dei diritti: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon e Olivia Harrison. Cosa non può il denaro…

Paul (“We love the game”) e Ringo (“The game is good”), hanno detto poco. Le vedove, ancora meno. Sono state anche rese note 10 delle 45 canzoni incluse nel gioco fra le quali “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Day Tripper,” “Taxman,” “Here Comes the Sun” e “Get Back.”

La notizia è apparsa dapprima sull’Ansa, ma io ho trovato anche la schermata e il trailer :mrgreen: .

Lituus

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Secondo questo articolo della BBC, un antico strumento di origine romanica utilizzato, via via sempre più raramente, fino all’epoca di Bach, è stato recentemente ricostruito dai ricercatori dell’Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) e dell’Università di Edinburgo.

Il Lituus ha l’aspetto di una lunga (2.4 m) tromba di legno e produce un suono simile a quello della tromba, ma con pronunciate inflessioni vocali.

Purtroppo il video che in origine era parte dell’articolo non esiste più. Una versione del lituus leggermente diversa, più corta grazie anche alla curvatura finale, si può vedere in questo video.

Grande Polyphonie

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L’opera più rappresentativa di François Bayle (di cui abbiamo già parlato qui) messa in linea da Avant Garde Project. Ve la presentiamo qui in un’unica playlist della durata di circa 36′ (putroppo ci può essere un piccolo intervallo fra un brano e l’altro).

L’intera composizione può essere scaricata in formato flac da AGP sia in 16 che in 24 bit.

Lo schema del brano, tratto dalle note di programma, è il seguente:

  1. Appel…
  2. …aux lignes actives
    The simplest concrete element, the line, thin and melodic arrives fastest at an abstraction of qualities. Active, passive, or intermediate, the true line is, according to Klee, the line subjected to a strong tension.
  3. …aux notes repetées
    Brief, equal, clear values scrabled by the patter of bells emitting call signals. Rigid, transposed, very tense repetition. Followed by a third, deep, abbreviated repetition. Transition, interrupted rubato.
  4. …au jardin
    A polyphony of space and colors. Contrast between very brief, delicate fragments–dry versus fluid – and ample quivering sheets having harmonic colors – static versus moving.
  5. …figures doubles
    Combination of symmetries. Two contrasting parts – like male and female – organized in series of paired cells. These are varied up to the eighth repetition, where the first element is then brought to a completion. The mirror-repeats are enriched with successive transformations through added harmonics.
    Then a new, very dynamic element appears – a man’s mask bringing tidings…
  6. …grande polyphonie
    A brief moment in the guise of a preface prepares the final “rappell”. Seven interconnected sections [a me sembrano 5, nota mia; le sezioni sono 7 in tutto] – though it is not immediately clear how they are related. Various sound signals are heard at frequent intervals, making it manifest that the role of the previous polyphonies was to lead up to the final combination. This makes it possible to listen in a musical way with a great deal of freedom, independence, superposing different voices. All the sound spaces used here resemble each other, from the more artificial and abstract ones to the totally concrete ones, which range from bird calls and songs to human calls and songs.
    And finally, the initial call signal dissolves in a long breath,
  7. Rappell…

Il collasso del tempo e gli ultimi echi

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Le ultime due parti di Echoes of Time and the River (Echoes II), di George Crumb ripulite, per quanto possibile, dalle impurità del vecchio vinile. Si intitolano Collapse of Time e Last Echoes of Time.

The most free and fantastic movement is the portentous Collapse of Time. Like the celebrated amphibians of Aristophanes, the string players croak out the nonsense syllables “Krek-tu-dai! Krek-tu-dai!” while the xylophone taps out the name of the composer in Morse code. As the movement proceeds and the underlying pulse falls away, the music heads off into a wide range of special effects – quasi-improvised fragments passed around among the various soloists, notated in circular patterns in the score. The descent into the solitude of the finale, Last Echoes of Time, comes at first as a relief and relaxation from all the foregoing; once the listener is convinced of the retrospective nature of these last pages, he can begin to explore more securely the implications in these echoes of all that has gone before. [Robert McMahan]

George Crumb – from Echoes of Time and the River, Collapse of Time / Last Echoes of Time

Melodie Rituali

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Ritual Melodies è una composizione del 1990 di Jonathan Harvey realizzata all’IRCAM.

A dispetto delle sonorità, alcune delle quali a un primo ascolto possono sembrare strumentali, si tratta invece di pura computer music. Tutti i suoni sono generati e manipolati dal computer. Nessuno è stato campionato, se non per fini di analisi e risintesi.

Questo procedimento è stato attuato per creare un materiale sonoro in continua trasformazione. I suoni base del brano sono risintesi di strumenti di origine cerimoniale e/o rituale (es: oboe indiano, campane tibetane, flauto di bambù, frammenti vocali di diversa origine…) le cui caratteristiche vengono poi alterate in fase di sintesi per creare suoni intermedi.

A mio avviso è decisamente un bel brano, sia dal punto di vista compositivo che da quello tecnico. L’unico lato che per me è un po’ disturbante è costituito da alcune sonorità di tipica marca IRCAM, come quel maledetto scampanio sulle frequenze alte, che sarà anche bello a un primo ascolto, ma ormai si trova in quasi tutti i brani realizzati laggiù.

Morsure Souffle

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coverLaurent Peter è un musicista svizzero (Ginevra) più noto come d’incise, attivo nell’area elettronica /dub / free jazz / found / environmental sound. Morsure Souffle è il suo album più recente, distribuito dalla netlabel Test Tube.

Morsure Souffle, has all the audio hallmarks of a highly subtle sound collage. Released on Portugese netlabel Testube, it is at once found/environmental sound collected, collated and fused into shapes. Then moments of sound echo of improvisational jazz, or at least the stripped echoes of the oeuvre, or even semi-precise mimicry triggering found moments in the audience. Yet the action of extreme electronic manipulation is never far from the palette and the guise of nature as a backdrop to audio acoustic experimentation is as sensible a template as any. Even the sound of the chime, catching the wind, or the approximation of it combined with a sonic hum/purr and gently advancing triangle alarm is enough of a sound argument. Then there is the central track la Banquise living up to its name, a feast of noise terror, (a humorous notion in itself), mutating in to crisp audio action of imaginary violated string experiments on a vanquished piano; reason enough to display control and succinctness of digital prowess.
[innerversitysound [Cyclic Defrost] / May 02, 2009]

L’intero album è scaricabile qui. Alcuni estratti:

Solo Observed

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Summer 1981, Lukas Foss began to compose SOLO, his first piano piece in twenty-eight years, for the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff who premiered it in Paris in March 1982. An initial twelve-tone motive reigns. Yet this is not twelve-toone music. The motive is like a theme which undergoes constant change. Nor is this minimal music; in spite of insistent repetitions, each repetition also contains a change implying development, growth and forward movement. Solo is a long development section, “senza sonata”; lumbering, struggling eighth-notes, circling, spiralling, forging ahead, always on the way, never pausing, never giving up, forever closing in on…

In the Spring of 1982, Lukas Foss and the Lincoln Center Chamber Players premiered a new version of Solo at the New World Festival in Miami, Florida. This version has an extended coda in which three other instruments join the piano, after some ten minutes of silent observing of the solo part. The three instruments are a keyboard instrument, a harp or cello and percussion.

The score has the word “Fine” written a bar before the end. This paradox should be explained: the last bar is like an appendage or error–the piano playing on without its master or the phonograph needle (metaphorically speaking) returning to the opening automatically, as the engine stops.

and here the 1982 version, called Solo Observed, with the add of cello (or harp), vibraphone (or marimba), and electric organ (or accordion) after 9/10 minutes.