From Oct 24, 2013.   Adam enters triumphant but stressed, exhausted.   He boasts of his contracts after his global agricultural sales trip.   Eve must confront him with the news that the Garden they have shamelessly exploited is dead.  Adam denies, then panics.
  Adam, Dylan Hillyer; Eve, Vania Chan; piano, Ben Smith; keyboard, Erica Chinò; percussion, Niall Lyn-McKee

No. 18a-b-c-  from Drought in Eden

From Oct 24, 2013.   Near dawn.  Adam kneels before a little faun, explaining to the faun his (scientific, Latin) name. (Genesis 1:28)  Eve finds him.  She badgers him to sing their Hymn to Paradise.  Eve has another agenda (Genesis 1:28)  See www.DavidLidov.com
     Adam, Dylan Hillyer; Eve, Vania Chan; piano, Ben Smith; keyboard, Erica Chinò; percussion, Niall Lyn-McKee

Drought No. 2a-b(+)

Reluctant as I am to provide instructions how to listen, this music calls for some words. It began as a short, very abstract, but ill-conceived exercise with midi-controlled music synthesis.  Once I realized the path was wrong, I interrogated my pile of fragments, What might they really be?  The fragments became programmatic. It was a bit after the invasion of Ukraine. A newspaper report I couldn’t fact check struck me, telling of parents in rural Russia who dared not publicly mourn their own children killed at the front because of political pressures.  The notion of lamentation repressed or stifled then became central to sculpting this quartet of partially isolated instruments, taking shape in months of horror and loss, in months of war, destruction, and disease, (all still continuing).  If the composer knows, the piece intends less to commemorate or protest or commiserate, much as we need all those, than simply to acknowledge, and also, perhaps, as it is said of Haydn’s missa in tempore belli, to enact a prayer for peace.

          What stifles lamentation? War, the stiff upper lip, if you must fight although you need more to weep. Politics, if mourning must not be mistaken for disloyalty to your government. Disease, when the funeral is distant and travel has been interdicted in a lockdown.  Fatigue, a last straw, one too many.  The program is merely skeletal.  The task of the Intro is to set the context of shock and dismay.  The Lento proper begins with the accordion’s “eleison”.  Along with lamentation and its muffled plaints, you may some hear irruptions and outbursts—quicky silenced; they are to no avail.  The Trios, twice interrupting, are slow dances, heavy gesture subbing for forbidden words.  The four Refrains respond to thoughts of time, dulling and distancing our pains, a solace never to be mistaken for healing. 

          Perhaps you will listen again, and we who cultivate the glory of abstraction will bypass the words.


Lento in Tempore Belli_v03

Live recording of my setting of Debora Lidov's poem, "Kirkegaard's Pantoum" for soprano (Desiree Soteres) and 14 instruments of the Alia Musica Pittsburgh ensemble conducted by Federico Garcia.  The poem was published in Five Points, Vol. 11 No. 3 and used by permission of the author.  
      Allied with the motif of 'paradox' in the poem, the setting exploits conflicting tuning systems.  The composition follows many of the strict formalities of the pantoum genre.
lidov at yorku.ca

Debora Lidov----Kierkegaard’s Pantoum   

I was born to build this house no one can sit in,  
to see it and for you to see it.  
More urgent a thing than virtue,  
having a point to make and making it meant   

to see it and for you to see it,  
a passage to come back to.  
Having a point to make and making it meant  
place collapsed. I listened,   

a passage to come back to—  
a street, a steeple, a stable.  
Place collapsed. I listened,  
I entered the glare of the paradox.   

A street, a steeple ,a stable.  
Brother, it wasn’t a building at all.  
I entered the glare of the paradox  
to dissect dialectics, to gut them.   

Brother, it wasn’t a building at all.  
It’s almost a music  
to dissect dialectics, to gut them.  
The organs gleam and beat on the stand.   

It’s almost a music—  
God’s demand, Abraham’s answer.  
The organs gleam and beat on the stand.  
I wasn’t born to preach.  

God’s demand, Abraham’s answer.  
No metaphor works for long. 
I wasn’t born to preach.  
Time cuts us and slips and lives.   

No metaphor works for long.  
You try me now like a girl tries virtue.  
Time cuts us and slips and lives.  
You carry me into a woods.  
 
You try me now like a girl tries virtue.  
You roll me up a sleeve,my brother.  
You carry me into a woods.  
You want me under the stars,   

my brother. My reader, you roll me,  
my future, my man, up a sleeve. 
I wasn’t born,  people, to persuade, to comfort. Under the stars. 
 I was born to build this house no one can sit in. 

Kiekegaard's Pantoum

Note for Open-Space CD

Mimesis.  From the start, my project was to write a movement in the same form as Ben Borretz’ piano/MIDI-piano composition for Bob Morris’s 70th birthday.  “Same form” in the sense that 

          “7,  3,  2,  7,  3,  9”     and    “hot, sweet, salty, hot, sweet, sour” 

have the same form.  The project is paradoxical because one thing I love about Ben’s piece for Bob is it resists dividing neatly into sections—building blocks.  It’s not clear where to put in those commas.  As I got going on it, I fell into imitating or responding to other characteristics as well, but not systematically:  textures, tempi, rhythms, and so on and--and wouldn’t you know--trying hard to imitate the very flow that resists defining form.  I do think it is fun to listen to one piece with the other in mind, but I would be disappointed to conclude that my Mimesis could not offer some pleasure all on its own.  The music indulges in one further reminiscence.  For harmony in Mimesis, I re-used the same box of crayons as in my violin and piano sonata Remembering minor dreaming of major.”  My excuse is that Ben once complimented me on its harmony.  I don’t know how much of a connection is thereby established; certainly, my harmonic method was  successful as a deadline meeting strategy.   Re-use, implying imitation, promotes fluid working.  As I understand it, the richness and rightness and helpfulness of the notion of “mimesis” in its philosophical tradition is refusing to oppose imitation to invention, understanding them as complementary.  D.L.

David Lidov

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