Contemporary Music

[Schigolch]

I think we can use this thread to discuss contemporary music. Let's say pieces after 1980, to fix a date.

Let's start with the wonderful String Quartets written by Brian Ferneyhough. My favourite is the Fourth, composed in 1990, a work that is able to impact the listener, and that requires an extreme virtuosity from the performers, in this case the Arditti Quartet and soprano Brenda Mitchell:

[Schigolch]

Toshio Hosokawa is one of the most interesting composers today. His work Circulating Ocean, premiered at the Szalburg Festival the year 2005, is perhaps not the best in his portfolio, (though is a very good piece, nonetheless) but it has the clear advantage of being probably the easiest entry door to Hosokawa's world.

We can hear Circulating Ocean in a version with Jonathan Stockhammer conducting the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI. There are fascinating moments, and it's only twenty short minutes. Give it a try.

[Schigolch]

Salvatore Sciarrino is one of the best avant-garde composers out there, and a lover of Opera. He wrote one of the works in our "Basic Repertoire", Luci mie traditrici.

In this post we can hear Infinito Nero, premiered in 1999. Using as inspiration the works of Italian mystic Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, Sciarrino presents us his usual contrast between silence and sound, slowly evolving. An exploration of rythm, the insinuation of a flute, the bursting in of human voice.... A very interesting piece.

This is a version performed by Sonia Turchetta and the Ensemble Recherche.

[Elektra]

Kaija Saariaho, Sept Papillons (2000)

[Schigolch]

It's uncanny how Saariaho uses the cello to simulate the movements of a butterfly's wings, and still respect the natural sound of the instrument.

[AmericanGesamtkunstwerk]

Takemitsu - Toward the Sea. for alto flute and guitar.

Boulez - Sur Incises. 3 pianos 3 harps and 3 mallet percussion

Lewis Nielson - You Choose. flute and piano

[Schigolch]

The late Fausto Romitelli was one of the most interesting composers of the last decades.

Arguably his best work would be Professor Bad Trip, written in 1998 for an ensemble of 10 instruments, and with a fascinating sonority:

[Schigolch]

Of course, Steve Reich is widely recognised as one of the top composers of our days, if not a plain genius. However, he seemed to be refractory to Opera.

Working with his wife, the visual artist Beryl Korot, he created in the '90s The Cave, what they called a 'multimedia opera'.

Exploring further the concept, they released another 'multimedia opera', Three Tales, in 2002. It's based on three episodes of the 20th century: the Hindenburg zeppelin accident, the atomic tests on the Bikini atoll, and the cloning of the sheep Dolly.



It has been released both as a CD, with the music by Reich, and as a DVD, including images by Korot.

Is this really opera?. Well, it's clearly right there, in the boundaries of the genre. In any case, it's an enjoyable piece of music...

In any case my favourite Reich's piece is still this wonderful Different Trains:

[Schigolch]

After the 9/11 killings, John Adams was commisioned to write a piece in memory of the victims.

On the Transmigration of Souls was premiered the year 2002, and together with voices invoking the name of some deceased, and prerecorded city sounds, is using both a choir and a children choir, to go along with the orchestra.

The piece received the Pulitzer Prize, and is not without its merits. However, comparing with another laments, like the Different Trains above, is perhaps a little bit superficial.

[Schigolch]

I love the work of the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa.



He was born in Hiroshima, in 1955. His musical education took place mainly in Germany, though he also explored japanese traditional music. He has written some very interesting operas: Hanjo, Vision of Lear and Matsukaze.




A thoughtful exploration of Japanese sounds, the silence, incorporate Nature into his works, along a complete understanding of the Western classical and avant-garde music, shape Hosokawa's style.

I'm searching for a new way to understand the music and the spirit of Japan, one way that allows me to be faithful to myself and my origins. We japanese must think again Western world, ponder its influence on us, to incorporate into our self.

Transience is beatiful. A note breaks the silence, is alive, and then returns to the silence.

Toshio Hosokawa

In 1991, Hosokawa completed the Hiroshima Requiem, in three movements. The first, "Night", recounted in instrumental music the eve of Little Boy's explosion, the night before the world changed forever. The second, "Death and Resurrection" merged the music with the voices of Hiroshima's children, extracted from this book:



in which boys and girls between five and fifteen years old in 1945, told us, in a naive and moving way, how they remembered living in Hiroshima just before and after August, 6th.

The third and last movement, "Dawn", was about Hirohisma coming back to life, from radioactive ashes.



To Hosokawa, the bomb was not a personal experience, but his mother and father told him about the terrible hours, and the death toll. However, after completing the Requiem, he was not satisfied, because he considered the new Hiroshima, a city of around one million inhabitants, impossible to tell from other similar Japanese cities, has now turn its back to Nature. An assignment from Baviera radio was all he needed to revisit the piece, and create in 2001, Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima.

The new work consists of five movements. The first one, "Prelude-Night", is very similar to the first version, just changing the orchestration, reinforcing brass and strings, and adding one celesta.

Hell is something that normally we only think about. But I've touched Hell, I've smelt Hell, and this I will take with me to Heaven.

I can't speak about it. It hurts me so... I can't speak with my mom about that day.

My mother and my little brother dissapeared. When I saw my father, he was not my father. It was just a jumble of bloody flesh in military rags. He died soon after.

I dream all nights about home, about my parents. I want to see them, I miss them so much.

I look at my face in a mirror, and only want to die.

I only ask the doctors each day, that they kill me.


From the book "Children of Hiroshima"





Little Boy was launched from Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber, at 8:15 AM, August, 6th, 1945.

It was three meters hight and weighted four tonnes

It was made with Uranium 235.

The bomb exploded 850 meters above the city of Hiroshima.

Air temperature reached one million degrees.

The energy liberated by the explosion was the equivalent of 15,000 tonnes of TNT.

Some 140,000 people die, the city was destroyed.

In the second movement, Death and Resurrection, we hear some experiences from Hiroshisma's children, in Japanese and English, a Requiem Mass, some radio speeches from Hitler and Tojo, sounds of bomb explosions,... To perform this movement we need three narrators, four soloist, mixed choir, children choir, orchestra and pre-recorded tape.



Winter Voice, for choir and orchestra is the third movement in the suite. Inspired in a poem by Paul Celan (not my translation):

Heimkehr

Schneefall, dichter und dichter,
taubenfarben, wie gestern,
Schneefall, als schliefst du auch jetzt noch.

Weithin gelagertes Weiss.
Drüberhim, endlos,
die Schlittenspur des Verlornen.

Darunter, geborgen,
stülp sich empor,
was den Augen so weh tut,
Hügel und Hügel,
unsichtbar.

Auf jedem,
heimgeholt in sein Heute,
ein ins Stumme entglittenes Ich:
hölzern, ein Pflock.

Dort: ein Gefühl,
vom Eiswind herübergeweht,
das sein tauben, sein schnee-
farbenes Fahnentuch festmacht.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homecoming


Snowfall, denser and denser,
dove-coloured as yesterday,
snowfall, as if even now you were sleeping.

White, stacked into distance.
Above it, endless,
the sleigh track of the lost.

Below, hidden,
presses up
what so hurts the eyes,
hill upon hill,
invisible.

On each,
fetched home into its today,
an I slipped away into dumbness:
wooden, a post.

There: a feeling,
blown across by the ice wind
attaching its dove- its snow-
coloured cloth as a flag.


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

it seems like we are immersed in a cold winter landscape. Choir lines reinforce the feeling of loneliness, interrupted by interludes that break the ocean of silence, and then die submerged in the water. We can even perceive the swell, a soft sound, gently beating.

This indifference, like a programmed mechanism, is what Hosokawa believes to be the heart of the industrial reconstruction of Japan, that has all but killed the spirit of the Japanese civilization.


Hosokawa-Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima-Winter Voice

The fourth movement, Signs of Spring, is a piece for alto, choir and orchestra. The text comes from a haiku by Matsuo Basho.



Carefully looking
Blooming shepherd's purse
Under the hedge

A small flower, that we can find if we pay attention to our surroundings. This is, for Hosokawa, as present in the 21st century, as it was for Basho in the 17th.

And this is the meaning of Signs of Spring, in the words of Hosokawa, music for a new hope, a new balance between Man and Nature.


Hosokawa-Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima-Signs of Spring

Let's complete this brief introduction to Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima, with the fifth and last movement.

It's Temple Bells Voice, for choir and orchestra, again based on a haiku by Basho. In the Buddhist temples of Japan, the biggest bell in each temple, is tolled at New Year's Eve, a total of 108 times, for the elimination of the 108 desires that cause suffering to a human being.

Where is the Moon?
The Temple's bell
is sinking in the depths of the ocean

Hosokawa-Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima-Temple Bells Voice

[HarpsichordConcerto]

Anybody hear listened to any significant pieces by Finish composer Aulis Sallinen (born 1935)? There appears six operas to his name.

[Schigolch]

I've heard a few of those six, and even watched on stage Kullervo, (in German) at Frankfurt Opera. It was ok, though I was not thrilled by the experience.

[Schigolch]

Gavin Bryars is a veteran British composer, with a musical career extending to more than forty years.

I guess many members will know this Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, one of his first works, written before Bryars was thirty years old. He explains the birth of the piece:

In 1971, when I lived in London, I was working with a friend, Alan Power, on a film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station. In the course of being filmed, some people broke into drunken song - sometimes bits of opera, sometimes sentimental ballads - and one, who in fact did not drink, sang a religious song "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet". This was not ultimately used in the film and I was given all the unused sections of tape, including this one.

When I played it at home, I found that his singing was in tune with my piano, and I improvised a simple accompaniment. I noticed, too, that the first section of the song - 13 bars in length - formed an effective loop which repeated in a slightly unpredictable way. I took the tape loop to Leicester, where I was working in the Fine Art Department, and copied the loop onto a continuous reel of tape, thinking about perhaps adding an orchestrated accompaniment to this. The door of the recording room opened on to one of the large painting studios and I left the tape copying, with the door open, while I went to have a cup of coffee. When I came back I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping.

I was puzzled until I realised that the tape was still playing and that they had been overcome by the old man's singing. This convinced me of the emotional power of the music and of the possibilities offered by adding a simple, though gradually evolving, orchestral accompaniment that respected the tramp's nobility and simple faith. Although he died before he could hear what I had done with his singing, the piece remains as an eloquent, but understated testimony to his spirit and optimism.

[Schigolch]

Wolfgang Mitterer is an interesting Austrian composer, that has written some opera, but this is a different beast, his Konzert für Klavier, Orchester und Electronics, with an especially fine "electronics" part:

[Schigolch]

From American composer Ingram Marshall, we can listen to one of his early pieces, Gradual Requiem, premiered in 1980, for voice, flute, mandolin, piano, synthesizer and pre-recorded tape. An interesting fusion of acoustic and electronic music: