Darknesse visible
About this Piece
"The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen." - Claude Debussy
Virtuosity - raw talent honed to a wicked technical edge by years of assiduous training - has long fascinated composers. Composers sometimes talk about exploring the potential of the instrument in a solo work, but they are also probing the limits of human dexterity and sympathetic imagination. There is a virtuosity of "sensibility and intelligence," as Luciano Berio described it, a spiritual as well as a mechanical virtuosity. So in a sense, these solos are all duets, parallel revelations of the artist and the instrument.
This struggle is played out over a ten-minute course in which first the cello seems to be providing material for a hovering electronic succubus, which then overwhelms the instrument. At the end, however, the cello frees itself from electronic domination. Oog had its premiere in 1996; it was also used as the basis for a solo dance piece by choreographer Thom Stuart in 1998.
"The beginning is sparse, tense, dramatic - long notes sharply cut off with brusque curlicues. What follows is both furious and strangely gorgeous, impressive virtuoso flourishes on open strings, fancy scale work, and passages thick with chords. The final, flutey bars are but the hint of laughter regained, just sweet enough to leave a comforting afterglow," Mark Swed wrote in his Los Angeles Times review of the premiere.
"Bassoonova is probably not to be danced to, indeed has not a great deal of the bossa nova about it," Matthews writes. "But the title, suggested to me flippantly by the filmmaker Barrie Gavin, became irresistible. It has five movements, which are played with as little break between them as possible. They are: Allegro - Molto Vivo - Recitativo - Ostinato - Allegretto, and the work lasts just under 9 minutes."
"This piece is an explosion of John Dowland's lute song 'In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell' (1610). No notes have been added; indeed, some have been removed," Adès writes. "Patterns latent in the original have been isolated and regrouped, with the aim of illuminating the song from within, as if during the course of a performance.
In darknesse let mee dwell,
the ground shall sorrow be,
The roofe Dispaire to barre
all cheerful light from mee,
The wals of marble blacke
that moistned still shall weepe,
My musicke hellish jarring sounds
to banish friendly sleepe.
Thus wedded to my woes,
and bedded to my Tombe,
O let me living die till death doe come.
Dowland ends the song with a restatement of the opening line."
"Detour Ahead was written during the summer of 2003 and completed on September 2nd. Much of Detour Ahead's thematic material is derived from the natural harmonics of the contrabass itself. The piece attempts to deal with this somewhat restricted material in a variety of contexts. Music that is first heard as essentially lyric evolves over time to reappear as a riff. At other times there is no evolution, only hard, contrasting juxtaposition. These conflicts increase in frequency over the course of the piece, culminating in a quotation from the Art Ensemble of Chicago's version of "Old Time Religion" arriving approximately three-quarters of the way into the piece. This is followed by a brief chorale passage of open strings and harmonic double stops with music derived from Detour's opening, where it was initially heard as tremolo pizzicato. The piece concludes with a coda which brings back another primary melodic idea and places it in the context of an ambling riff."
"The piece is a continuation of the ideas found in Vermont Counterpoint, where a soloist plays against a pre-recorded tape of him- or herself. In New York Counterpoint the soloist pre-records ten clarinet and bass clarinet parts and then plays a final 11th part live against the tape. The compositional procedures include several that occur in my earlier music. The opening pulses ultimately come from the opening of Music for 18 Musicians (1976). The use of interlocking repeated melodic patterns played by multiples of the same instrument can be found in my earliest works, Piano Phase (for 2 pianos or 2 marimbas) and Violin Phase (for 4 violins), both from 1967. In the nature of the patterns, their combination harmonically, and in the faster rate of change, the piece reflects my recent works, particularly Sextet (1985).
"New York Counterpoint is in three movements: fast, slow, fast, played one after the other without pause. The change of tempo is abrupt and in the simple relation of 1:2. The piece is in the meter 3/2 = 6/4 (=12/8). As is often the case when I write in this meter, there is an ambiguity between whether one hears measures of 3 groups of 4 eighth notes, or 4 groups of 3 eighth notes. In the last movement of New York Counterpoint the bass clarinets function to accent first one and then the other of these possibilities while the upper clarinets essentially do not change. The effect, by change of accent, is to vary the perception of that which in fact is not changing."
-- John Henken is the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Director of Publications.