Two Vestiges

Broken Obelisk

Piano Quintet Excerpt

While living in Köln, Germany, I attended an exhibition of the artist Ursula Burghardt (1928 – 2008), who was the wife of composer Mauricio Kagel (1931 – 2008). She never considered herself an artist, and until her death in 2008, a mere two weeks after Kagel’s death, her works were virtually unknown. Near the end of her life, she became physically infirm and unable to make sculptures. Therefore, she began to draw three-dimensional works, which were in her mind as sculptures that she wanted to make, but could not. The first vestige, Ribbon Sculpture, was inspired by one of these drawings, and the melodic material is threaded through a series of sonorities, representative of the three-dimensional world in which she wanted to create.

Ribbon Sculpture

I recently assisted in a series of recording sessions with the Luxembourg Philharmonie whereby they recorded three works by Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa. The first, the Cello Concerto, contained three beautiful sonorities in its opening bars. I plucked these sonorities, and replanted them in my own sonic plot, and they serve as the basis of the second movement, Japanese Garden (karesansui).

Japanese Garden

Remnants (of time and space), composed in 2009 for Ryan Fogg, is a single‐form work containing seven movements that coalesce into two main parts. Each part signifies the spirit of two places the composer visited and lived in 2009: Moscow, Russia, and Lake Baikal, Siberia. The first two movements making up Part I of Remnants examine the concept of time as space and as movement. In the third movement, time, as it has been defined within the first two movements, is interrupted, and this interruption is aurally identifiable, as the descending closing gesture of the second movement becomes the springboard into the third movement. Part II explores the fluctuations and changes that occur as time morphs into space and eventually reaches its end. The ebb and flow of time, heard in the fourth and fifth movements, gives way to the blurred boundaries between time and space in the sixth movement. The concluding movement creates a static atmosphere as time runs out. Each movement of the piece was composed using a motivic segment, or “remnant,” contained within the first movement. This compositional technique represents a realization of the composer’s philosophy that every place leaves its mark upon those who live in or visit that place, just as travelers and residents leave their mark upon the places they encounter. - Carla Colletti

Remnants

1st Movement of the chamber version of my piano concerto.  Based on the abstract expressionist painting by Barnett Newman of the same name.  Performed by ensemble: Peripherie in Iowa City, on Sunday, 10 March 2013.  I conducted; Ann DuHamel, piano.  

drdanger