Re-Invention of Oil (w/ JACK Quartet)

II. Still II

I. Like Clockwork I

Three Errors In Recall

CHROMA:
Stuart King (clarinet), Richard Bayliss (horn), Rolf Hind (piano)

RAM student instrumentalists:
Lucy Driver (flute), Isabel Kent (oboe), Ryan Delgado Bareirro (bassoon)

In 1434, Dutch painter Jan van Eyck, at the court of Philip the
Good in Burgundy, finished the Alfornini Portrait, one of the earliest oil
paint masterpieces. In 1508, Michelangelo completed his statue, David,
in Florence. The year before, the Duke of Ferrara commissioned
Burgundian composer Josquin des Prez to set Psalm 51, Miserere mei
Deus, in honor of Florentine Catholic heretic Girolamo Savonarola. In
1584, Franco-Flemish composer Orlande de Lassus set the Miserere mei
Deus within his setting of the Seven Penitential Psalms, modeling it after
des Prez.

Jan van Eyck’s techniques catalyzed the diffusion of oil painting in
Europe, from Belgium to Florence. The layering of translucent colors
allowed for greater control in light, color, and detail. This addition is
opposite to that of sculpture, in which material is chipped, broken, and
smoothed away. One creates the image from nothing while the other
finds the image hidden within.

On The Invention of Oil, 1434/On David, 1508 explores musical
analogues for ‘the hidden image’ in the resonance of instruments. As the
layers of paint slowly form the image, pitch slowly emerges out the
resonance of the woodwinds. As successive chips mold the sculpture, the
successive operations inside the piano mold its resonance.

At the core of this piece are transcriptions and manipulations of
both Josquin’s and Lassus’ Miserere mei Deus, which petitions God to
refine us, to build us up, to remove our impurities, to create in us a new
heart. It asks God to reveal the hidden image within us which is pleasing,
which is good.

The Invention of Oil, 1434/On David, 1508

Played by Daniel Espie
Philadelphia, PA 05/30/20

So Vast A Sweetness/Amherst

Recorded by George Fu, Pianist, at the Royal Academy of Music, January 2021.

In August 1870, after 8 years of exchanging correspondence, the minister, author, abolitionist, and publisher Thomas Wentworth Higginson and poet Emily Dickinson met at her home in Amherst. He was only there for an hour, during which he sat, unable to get a word in edgewise, as this faint, childlike figure spoke unbroken about her life and her thoughts. He left, feeling she had “an excess of tension…[from] an abnormal life…She was much too enigmatical a being for me to solve in an hour’s interview, and an instinct told me that the slightest attempt at direct cross-examination would make her withdraw into her shell; I could only sit still and watch, as one does in the woods…” 

After he left, he received a letter, which began:

'Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits.'

I’m struck by an image of this woman, seated at her desk by the window of her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, writing in her private journal these little poems, these little crystalline perfections, of such precision, clarity, and profound humanity, poems which would echo out like ice cracking on a frozen pond in a Massachusetts winter. And to this woman, whose inner thoughts would become part of the American consciousness, her dear friend Thomas’ act of listening in that single hour they would share together was Enough.

I imagine this piece to be something like those poems. A tiny, human sound resonating over a quiet flurry of activity, asking to be listened to.

so vast a sweetness/Amherst - George Fu, Pianist

In 1939, when he began the painting The Sunlit Terrace, Pierre Bonnard and his partner, Marthe de Méligny, of 50 years lived in Normandy, France. The next year, the Nazis would invade France, forcing Bonnard and his wife, in their 70s, to flee to Vichy. Between 1939 and 1946, Bonnard lived under Nazi occupation and would lose a close friend, his brother, and then his wife. From his destroyed home in Normandy, after his return, he finished The Sunlit Terrace.
	The painting, however, reflects none of that experience. In orange- and violet-reds, it is a wide landscape of a garden on a summer day. On either side of the garden are two sides of a house, one with an awning and one with a window looking into a room where someone is reading.  It is a picturesque scene and typical of Bonnard, lush with color and framed by architecture. Like most of his other paintings, it is likely painted from memory.  His output is filled with candid paintings of his wife in domestic tranquility, memories of happy days, though his life was often complex and his relationships strained. Bonnard’s paintings are manufactured memories, idealized renderings of hoped-for realities.
	The Piano Sonata no. 30 in E Major, op. 109 is one of Beethoven’s last piano sonatas, written after he had stopped performing due to his deafness. There is a rumor that the low trills of the B-section are the only sounds Beethoven, now significantly deaf, could hear, and only because of the incredible vibrations they would have caused. There is little to substantiate that claim, but what would hearing music have been like for Beethoven? No doubt that his inner ear was extraordinary, but his music must have sounded distant and muffled, like an echo of a distant love. 
	This string quartet is, ultimately, about memory, about how we remember, hear, process, and forget music. When, after the actual sounds have long died away, we try to recall a long-forgotten melody, and it comes back transfigured by time and distance, what does this music sound like?

____________________
Recorded June 5, 2019 in St. Mark's Church, London by 

Djumash Poulsen, Violin
Roberts Balanas, Violin
Varinia Oyola-Rebaza, Viola
Sarah Gait, Cello

Jon Paul Mayse

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