Pre-concert Talk: Mostly Modern, February, 2006

This is the text of a pre-concert talk which I gave in 2006 at the invitation of Dr. Benjamin Dwyer, the curator of the Mostly Modern Concert Series, and the Mostly Modern Festival of Contemporary Music.

PROGRAMME:
Franco Donatoni:	Fili (fl & pf)
John Buckley:	Arabesque (alto sax ) 
Benjamin Dwyer:	Tiento (sop. sax. & pf) 
Giacinto Scelsi:	Kho-lo (fl & cl)
 			Duo (fl & cl)
 			Duo (fl & perc)
MM/IMRO Young Irish Composers' Competition Winning Work
MM/AIC International Composers' Competition Winning Work
Massimo Botter:	Trio (vln, vc, pf)  (IP)
Aldo Clementi:	Serenata (gtr, fl, cl, vln, va,) (IP)
Raymond Deane:	Seachanges (fl, vln, vc, pf, perc)




Arabesque for Solo Alto Saxophone

Arabesque for Solo Alto Saxophone was written for and is dedicated to Kenneth Edge. The work was completed in 1990 and was first performed by Kenneth Edge in the John Field Room of the National Concert Hall, Dublin in November 1991.

The title refers to the ornate and elaborate ornamentation of the melodic line which runs right through the piece. Arabesque is in a single movement with extremely fast and vigorous opening and closing sections enclosing a slower more lyrical middle section.

Tiento is the Portuguese word for touch and was a type of musical composition in Baroque and pre-Baroque times which signified a composition which was 'played' as opposed to 'sung'. In this sense, it is the precursor to the Toccata. But the softer Tiento also implied for me the more intimate, human idea of touch. The piece therefore explores the medium of the instrumental composition, the virtuosic work on the one hand while attempting to investigate more intimate, psychological and emotional areas on the other.

As an instrumental work, Tiento remains outside the scope of all but the assured virtuoso saxophonist requiring technical demands such as multiphonics, performing beyond the normal range, extremes in dynamics and some specific improvisations. The piano, for its part, provides rhythmic and chordal foils against which the saxophone lines fight. This tension, in fact, provides the more intimate story. The work is concerned with the ultimate incongruence of the parts. They work increasingly against each other reaching a point where they finally snap and release the saxophone into a spiralling solo. A fracture has occurred. Some attempt at a coming together is achieved but the music of each instrument never really finds peace as a unified entity. Failure is the underlying theme. 


Giacinto Scelsi

Giacinto Scelsi was born into an old family of Italian aristocracy on 8th January 1905 in La Spezia and died in Rome on 9th August 1988.  Scelsi's ascendance from obscurity occurred in the mid-1980s, and was consummated in October 1987 at the SIMC International Festival in Cologne where his symphonic music was featured to great acclaim.  His personal eccentricity and the unusual route of his rise to prominence have combined to produce wildly differing impressions of Scelsi the man and the composer.  His aristocratic position and resulting means lent a dilettantish quality to his early background, in spite of a conspicuous study of the major musical trends of the time.  In 1935-36, after he had already written several large-scale works, Scelsi studied the Viennese style with Walter Klein, a student of Schoenberg, and went on to declare an allegiance to Berg's version of tonal dodecaphony.  He next studied Scriabin's harmonic vocabulary with Egon Koehler in Geneva, and the resulting combination of mystical  and chordal thinking clearly marks the remainder of his career.

He continued to compose, in a mostly conventional style which attained something of a personal character apart from these influences.  For instance, although it was written prior to the "break" in his career, Scelsi's String Quartet No. 1 is a work of considerable quality, and one of the few from this period which he continued to embrace.  Scelsi's life story becomes more mysterious after this period, a situation he maintained intentionally.  He resisted any attempt to analyse his music, refused to be photographed, and generally removed himself from public view.  All of these decisions followed quickly in the wake of his mental breakdown in the late 1940s, a crisis from which he apparently recovered only very slowly. According to later reports, the only therapy which helped him was sitting and striking a single piano key again and again, listening for the slight differences in each individual sound.  This is also how he reinvented himself as a composer.  Fascination with ancient mythology and other cultures around the world is often expressed in Scelsi's titles. Although long considered baffling & unprecedented, in retrospect, Scelsi's fundamental concerns were actually fairly typical of the 1960s.  His interest in world music, and especially Eastern mysticism, was very much in the air and was reflected in both the classical and popular spheres.  Scelsi is sometimes described as a minimalist, and in that he could be seen as a forefather of the minimalist movement, yet his music is packed with activity.  Although it may involve only one note for extended periods, that note will be restated in parallel intervals, slurred, or varied in orchestration in a continuous way throughout the piece.

'Seachanges (with Danse Macabre)'
Raymond Deane writes: This piece is based on a short melody that came while walking on the beach at Ardtrasna, County Sligo, and that returned to haunt me a year later on a very different beach at Huatulco on the Pacific coast of Mexico. The piece is informed throughout by this extreme contrast and by my reactions to the grotesque and gaudy morbidity characteristic of Mexican iconography. The word 'Seachanges' was suggested both by the Atlantic/Pacific aspect and by Shakespeare's Full fathom five my father lies..., thus linking up with the theme of death. The use of marimba and strummed stringed instruments evokes the Mexican 'mariachi' band.
Seachanges (with Danse Macabre) along with Catacombs (1994) and March Oubliée (1996) make up my Macabre Trilogy, a series of chamber works which deal irreverently with the theme of death.


Massimo Botter: Trio
La Nube di Oort (The Oort Cloud), a cloud of comets between 1.5 and 3 light years from the sun discovered by Jan Oort in 1950, seems to be the place where long period comets (as Hale Bop) come from: attracted from the planetary system, they pass through its inner part. The cloud provides a continuous supply of comets that replace the destroyed ones.
The first idea of the piece arose from the desire to associate the periodical movements of the stars, revolution and rotation, with the instruments of the Trio. The movement of revolution of the planets, their coming back always alike but always, even a little, out of phase can be found in the elaboration and the development of the melodic and rhythmic materials as well as in the harmonic ones, caused sometimes by the interpolation of the elliptic lines along which the instruments move.
All this is contained in a formal structure divided in 7 cycles that exhaust in the first 61 bars and then turn up again in full or partially, sometimes masked, as in an eclipsis (partial eclipsis, indeed) reciprocally provoked by the instruments themselves. The harmonic concept inspired by the attractions and repulsions among homologous sounds or the apparent neutrality of the octaves and quints lead back to the energy of the movement generated by the magnetic-gravitational attraction of the planets marking out harmonic routes, sometimes complex, that also complete in linear-melodic sense.