Tombeau de Messiaen by Jonathan Harvey

Performed by Donald Berman at the 2003 Florida State University Festival of New Music. reflections on the nature of light is a set of three piano pieces which are inspired by recent preoccupations with the nature of light, sparked by Leonard Shlain’s Art and Physics and Richard P. Feynman’s QED: The strange theory of light and matter. While not intended as programmatic depictions of light, I have no doubt that the ideas inspired by these books were an indirect influence on the composition of, and my subsequent reaction to, these pieces.
refractions is a musical analogy for the way in which light gives way to numerous, previously imperceptible, colors when passed through a prism. At times, all of the musical material is drawn from partials of a single fundamental, while in other passages the two hands separate into independent streams yielding multiple spectra.
Leonardo da Vinci used the term “sfumato” to describe the phenomenon in which shadows and outlines of objects become less crisp and increasingly blurred as they recede into the distance. In sfumato, as in Impressionistic paintings, blurring becomes one of the most prominent features as melodies blur into harmony, harmonies into resonance, and successive phrases blur into one another in a continually and gradually evolving improvisational architecture.
la Sainte-Chapelle opens with a series of slow, sustained chords—a progression of harmonic colors with each sonority leaving its distinctive mark on the cumulative resonance. The slight variations in harmonic color from one chord to the next may be likened to the various shadings of natural light by the magnificent stained-glass windows at la Sainte-Chapelle and other cathedrals. Just as the color of this transformed light is an integral part of the cathedral’s architecture, the resonance of these chords is central to the design of the movement, gradually coalescing into a peal of bells near the end.
These three movements may be viewed as musical metaphors for the physical, perceptual, and spiritual natures of light, respectively.

refractions

Clifton Callender

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