A little while ago I ordered some scores by Jürg Frey and Antoine Beuger from the Wandelweiser catalog, and had a brief email exchange with Antoine Beuger.
One of the pieces I received is Beuger's 'monodies pour mallarmé,' which consists of many pages of score, each of which offers a group of four whole notes. The performer plays each note for a long time and adds silences of indeterminate length between them. For some reason, Beuger's piece really got me going, and I wrote a group of pieces based on some of his tetrads. harmonies for mallarmé is for organ, synthesizer or ensemble. It uses four-part chords generated by manipulating some of Beuger's four-note groups. Like much of the Wandelweiser music, it is rhythmically very simple and slow, lasting over 9 minutes. Loving Phrases for three soprano instruments (3' 15") . This uses some of the note sequences that I generated from the Beuger tetrads, making them into a series of heterophonic phrases. I was thinking of flute, harp, and violin, but any soprano instruments of about the same weight would work. endless dream for piano, one hand (2' 40"). This uses note sequences as in the pieces above, using the pedal to accumulate clouds of pitches. buildings for multiple voices of similar range (2' 15"). Here some of the tetrads are made into phrases which build from unison pitches into four-note chords. All of these pieces should be easy to perform, in keeping with my desire to avoid virtuosity in a significant portion of my work.
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The score fragment above is from a choral piece by Jürg Frey, a member of the Wandelweiser group of composers and performers. I used it as the banner picture for a new Facebook group, 'New Music for Choir.' I was surprised that such a group did not already exist.
I am hoping that composers and new-music choirs will use this group to exchange information and promote new choral music. I have offered to change the banner picture to other score fragments that members send to me. |
AuthorSame guy; more opinionated. Archives
June 2024
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