I have initiated the series APT (Artist Phone Takes). Recorded in our apartments and in live performance with our everyday devices, and posted on Soundcloud, APT presents excellent and evanescent music without waiting for studio setups.

C Cooper- Is It A Boy Or A

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

ConstanceCooper-CONSULTING THE DELPHIC ORACLE FROM SPACE

sharp satiric avant-garde short electronic piece with my processed voice   poem by Wislawa Szymborska.  translated by Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

Lento in Tempore Belli_v03

David Lidov

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