Lessons with Shmurak / 3

David Lang - This Was Written By Hand

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1.) The Boatman (Prelude) - Tigran Hamasyan
 2.) The Court Jester - Tigran Hamasyan
 3.) Sibylla - Tigran Hamasyan
 4.) Lilac - You get the idea right?
 5.) Love Song 
6.) Someday My Prince Will Come
7.) The Boatman (Interlude)
8.) Levitation 21
 9.) Rythm - Ari Hoenig & Tigran (that’s honestly how they spell it.)
10.) Drip - Tigran Hamasyan
 11.) Lament - the rest as before. 
12.) The Roads That Bring Me Closer to You 
13.) The Boatman (Postlude)

Whiplash presents: PlayerSeries // tigran hamasyan. - September 2022

(English translation below)

РАССЫПАННЫЕ СЛОВА для сопрано и фортепиано 
по стихотворению Бориса Пастернака (2016)
Caroline Melzer (sopr.), Axel Bauni (piano)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Давай ронять слова,
Как сад - янтарь и цедру,
Рассеянно и щедро,
Едва, едва, едва.

Не надо толковать,
Зачем так церемонно
Мареной и лимоном
Обрызнута листва.

Кто иглы заслезил
И хлынул через жерди
На ноты, к этажерке
Сквозь шлюзы жалюзи.

Кто коврик за дверьми
Рябиной иссурьмил,
Рядном сквозных, красивых
Трепещущих курсивов.

Ты спросишь, кто велит,
Чтоб август был велик,
Кому ничто не мелко,
Кто погружен в отделку

Кленового листа
И с дней Экклезиаста
Не покидал поста
За теской алебастра?

Ты спросишь, кто велит,
Чтоб губы астр и далий
Сентябрьские страдали?
Чтоб мелкий лист ракит
С седых кариатид
Слетал на сырость плит
Осенних госпиталей?

Ты спросишь, кто велит?
- Всесильный бог деталей,
Всесильный бог любви,
Ягайлов и Ядвиг.

Не знаю, решена ль
Загадка зги загробной,
Но жизнь, как тишина
Осенняя,- подробна.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Let's scatter our words 
As the garden scatters amber zest, 
Absentmindedly and generously 
Bit by bit by bit.  

Let's not discuss 
Why the leaves are patterned 
So formally 
With ruby and lemon.  

Who welled up with needles 
And gushed through the slats, 
The floodgate blinds, 
Onto the music books in the shelf.  

Who dyed the outdoor mat 
With rowan berries 
Like a canvas of diaphanous, 
Trembling italics.  

You will ask, who ordains 
That August should be great, 
For whom is nothing too small, 
Who is absorbed with etching  

A maple leaf 
And who, from the time of Ecclesiastes, 
Hasn't quit his post 
Hewing alabaster?

You will ask, who ordains 
That the September lips 
Of asters and dahlias should suffer? 
That the fine leaves of broom 
Should waft from greying caryatids 
Onto the damp flagstones 
Of autumn hospitals?  

You will ask, who ordains?  - 
The all-powerful God of details, 
The all-powerful God of love, 
Of Jagailos and Jadwigas.  

I don't know if the dark riddle 
Of the tomb has been solved; 
But life, like autumn 
Silence, is in the details.

SCATTERED WORDS for Soprano and Piano after a Poem by Boris Pasternak (2016).

русский комментарий ниже

The trio Echoes Of the Passing Day takes the form of a kind of musical equivalent of the Proustian-Joycean 'stream of consciousness'. A free stream of sound associations, themselves set in motion by the actual title of the work, is called upon to bring out not the directly linear logical connections between elements but rather their remote subconsciously associative connections. The style of the composition seems like the product of an 'after-culture', when such radically different phenomena as quotations from Beethoven and instrumental theatre are naturally able to exist side by side in a single context.

The work is dedicated to Elizabeth Wilson and interwoven within it are two emblems of her name: Beethoven Fur Elise and the American popular song Elizabeth. The process of musical development also takes in archetypal symbols of national differences (for the Germans the march-like 'rechts-links'; for the Russians the exasperated question 'Shto delat'?' — "What is to be done?' — …Chemyshesky …Lenin… Perestroika…).

The closing quotation of a line from Ulysses draws everything that has gone before as it were into the context of a Joycean novel.
__________________________
Трио "Отзвуки ушедшего дня" написано по заказу лондонского ансамбля Chameleon и впервые исполнено в том же году на фестивале современной музыки в Хаддерсфилде. 

В тот период я чувствовал абсолютную обреченность прежних форм высказывания — интонационных, синтаксических, жанровых. Я просто перестал в них верить. Уже сам музыкальный звук казался мне слишком предзаданным. И музыкальные логики, — как мне думалось, — держат нас в тесной клетке, из которой мы никак не можем вырваться. Мне хотелось освободиться от предсказуемости т.н. «естественной» логики, но построить, тем не менее, некое мотивированное сочинение, не связанное ни с западным структурализмом, ни с русской программностью. Я много размышлял тогда о сюрреализме, с его немыслимыми диффузиями и трансформациями. Как ни странно, это важнейшее направление авангарда практически не коснулось музыки! Мне казалось, что метод бретоновского автоматического письма, прустовско-джойсовский «поток сознания» должны освободить музыку от пут логической выводимости и помочь композитору прорваться к самому себе, к собственной «звуковой биологии». В пьесе причудливо переплетаются элементы инструментального театра, цитаты из Бетховена, речевые акции исполнителей (реплики «rechts-links», как символ немецкого порядка, извечный русский вопрос «что делать?», который я ввел в тот момент, когда мне действительно было не ясно, что делать с формой). Трио посвящено английской виолончелистке Элизабет Вильсон, и как знак ее имени в кульминацию вклинивается мотив известной американской песенки «Elizabeth». И, наконец, заключительная цитата из последних строк «Улисса» переводит все происходящее в контекст джойсовского романа. 

Владимир Тарнопольский

Echoes Of The Passing Day,                      trio for clarinet, cello and piano (1990)

Me playing the opening movement of Beethoven's Pastoral sonata. LVB walking through nature, wrestling his demons, being all immortal... Hope you like.

Beethoven Piano Sonata In D Major, Op. 28 - 'Pastoral'  I. Allegro

Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 6 In B Minor, Op. 74 'Pathétique', IV. Finale- Adagio Lamentoso

Schoenberg ensemble
Reinbert de Leeuw, conductor

FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM was written in 2004 on a commission from the Dutch Schoenberg Ensemble. Its world premiere of the composition took place the same year at the Concertgebouw under the direction of Reinbert de Leuw.

I tried to construct my piece on the basis of juxtaposition of two contrasting types of music: the music of breath and the music of mechanism, as well as, correspondingly, two types of time – the continuous and the mechanically discreet. It was especially intriguing for me to examine the processes of the emergence and formation of each type of music, and also to trace the stages of the transition of one into the other. I was also greatly interested in the idea of the gradual modulation of the timbral beats of sound into rhythmic structures, as well as the transformation of instrumental sound-color into rhythm.

The pendulum-like development of the musical material of the piece (involving repetitions with gradual changes of the "trajectory" of the movement), as well as a few other constructive principles of the composition brought to my mind the famous pendulum built by Jacques Foucault in 1851 for a visual demonstration of the fact of the Earth's rotation. The title of the work also contains the allusion to the famous mystification novel by Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pendulum."

Foucault's Pendulum for large ensemble

Keren Motseri, soprano,
Israel Contemporary Players, 
Ilan Volkov, conductor

Mattino (1940) 
by Cesare Pavese (1908–1950)

La finestra socchiusa contiene un volto 
sopra il campo del mare. I capelli vaghi 
accompagnano il tenero ritmo del mare.
Non ci sono ricordi su questo viso. 
Solo un'ombra fuggevole, come di nube. 
L'ombra è umida e dolce come la sabbia 
di una cavità intatta, sotto il crepuscolo. 
Non ci sono ricordi. Solo un sussurro 
che è la voce del mare fatta ricordo.
Nel crepuscolo l'acqua molle dell'alba 
che s'imbeve di luce, rischiara il viso. 
Ogni giorno è un miracolo senza tempo, 
sotto il sole: una luce salsa l'impregna e un sapore di frutto marino vivo.
Non esiste ricordo su questo viso. 
Non esiste parola che lo contenga 
o accomuni alle cose passate. Ieri, 
dalla breve finestra è svanito come 
svanirà tra un istnente, senza tristezza 
né parole umane, sul campo del mare.

Study of a Girl Reading Pavese for soprano and chamber ensemble

For me breath is one of the most important primary images of music. Breath is the first sign of life as well as its final gesture.

In "The Breath of the Exhausted Time", relying on an endless wave-like rhythm of ascentions and declines, I tried to cross the boundary of the possibilities of a purely syntactical understanding of form and the idea of the breath became for me an alternative to Riemann's "tectonically-building" principles. At the basis of this composition lie not only structurally built musical material, but also the unceasingly forming sound matter itself. The appearance and evaporation of sounds, their merging into one another and condensation determine the flow of the form. In this piece I perceived musical time as "slow time". I perceived it to be a sounding metaphor of a gigantic Solaris (according to Stanislav Lemm and Andrei Tarkovsky).

The Breath of the Exhausted Time for orchestra.   Wladimir Jurowski, cond.

XXI Century ensemble (Vienna), cond. Peter Burwik

The idea for this piece originated immediately after I learned about Frank Gehry's wonderful architectural project for the Pierre Boulez Saal. The two weightless ovals that envelop the space like a band instantly made me think of a Moebius strip, that paradoxical geometrical figure that unites the inner and outer surfaces of a particular space in one continuous transition. When we move along this band, we are transported, as it were, into the opposite dimension without crossing a spatial border. This became the idea for my piece: to present the process of the musical material "flowing" from one quality into the opposite as a specific type of perpetuum mobile — a kind of Perpetuum Moebius. The piece is dedicated to the musicians of the Boulez Ensemble.

Perpetuum Moebius for Fl, B.cl, Vn, Vc, Pn.

When I started working on the piece, I tried to imagine the sound world of the late Beethoven. It is known that he felt an excruciating roar in his ears and that with the help of a hearing aid he could only hear sounds in the low register. Because of the progressive deafness, Beethoven had to give up his work as an interpreter. Paradoxically, his last appearance as a pianist was connected with the performance of the Fourth Piano Concerto, one of Beethoven's most cheerful works. The only "shadow" in it is the short second movement, it is often interpreted as Orpheus' descent into hell. This "sound image" became a kind of impulse for my piece, which begins with the lowest notes of the piano. In the composition I repel the sound images of the second movement of the fourth piano concerto and appeal to our "inner hearing" with its selective memory and the limited frequency spectrum that determined the sound world of the late Beethoven. I imagined the piece as a kind of letter to Beethoven, and that's how it got its title.

Be@thoven–Invocation for orchestra

The main idea for this composition was inspired by a set of snapshots obtained by means of the "Hubble" telescope. The galaxies and stellar nebulae demonstrate color spectra of fantastic beauty and an astonishing variety of forms: ellipses, spirals and innumerable irregular structures. Appearing to be immobile to the lay observer, in reality, following the law of the red shift, discovered by astronomer Edwin Hubble, these hyper-gigantic formations move away from each other with an incredible, continuously increasing speed. This results in the calm grandeur of the universe which in reality presents a monstrous energy of constant motion, one that simultaneously is creative and destructive.

My composition expresses a peculiar sound metaphor of Hubble's idea. Out of an amorphous mass of the "sound nebula" the fractal pitch structures gradually crystallize. In a similarly gradual way the "syntactic gravitation" forms large-scale phased periods. The dramatic play of matter and energy, the changeover of one to the other, leads to a constantly accelerating expansion of the sound space.

The principle of the red shift — the visual indicator of the grandiose expansion of the universe — is imprinted in the musical texture, not only metaphorically, but also structurally. In the formation of the composition's parameters of sound, the idea of phased shifts is reflected in shifts of pitches — the intervallic displacement of adjacent sound fractal chords — and shifts in the frequency domain — mutations of the timbre.

Redshift for orchestra and electronics

This piece presents a sort of compositional study based on the idea of Roland Barthes about "writing degree zero." It is an attempt to work with the most neutral type of musical material, bereft of any mythology, the most crucial aim of which is to create a "speaking" form with a sculpture-like relief. The piece was written upon commission from the Klangforum Wien ensemble for the bicentennial anniversary if Liszt in Weimar.

Last and Lost for ensemble. Klangforum Wien, Sylvain Camberling cond.

The title "Tabula Russia" presents a phonetic and semantic allusion to the well-known Latin expression "tabula rasa" (blank slate). This is how the wax tablets used for notating texts were used in antiquity. Before a new text was inscribed, the old text was erased. 

The main sonar idea in my composition was the sound of the Russian low bell. In Russian bells, unlike most of the European ones, there is an oscillation not of the cupola, but of the bell, which makes it possible to mould very large bells that emit very low tones, extremely abundant in overtones. This primeval bell rumble forms a remarkable combination of the harmonious cosmos of overtones and the chaos of the multitude of "arbitrary" side-tones, a peculiar kind of sound "chaosmos." Chaos fraught with cosmos, with orderliness – this metaphor, as it seems to me, contains an important archetype of the Russian consciousness. Russia, being in search for its identity, continuously rewrites its own history, each time starting from a "tabula rasa".

Foucault's Pendulum for large ensemble

Vladimir Tarnopolski

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