Tenderness's Forever
Six miniatures
for nine players
Description
“Tenderness’s Forever”, Six Miniatures
The Mythopoetic Principle:
These Six Miniatures render a dynamism analogous to the oral tradition of myths. The composition doesn’t refer to any content of myth, but the process perceived and used by the audience and musicians alike has several similarities with the structured extemporaneousness of story-telling in myth, in that the material and process is offered, but the content is released to the listeners’ imagination.
When the miniatures are told (I will use the verb tell rather than play), by the musicians, the musicians act as bards by choosing the pace of their presentation, similarly the old bards would size their stories, feeling their audience, keeping always the same story, but tailoring it each time on the listeners speed of breath and heart beat, they would live with their observers.
These are expanding and contracting miniatures; audience and executers have the possibility to zoom in and out on the narration, so that the relations and proportions between each section proliferate, shrink, and change, favouring the generation of multiple rhetorics.
Also the sequence in which they are proffered can be shuffled and reorganized, as chapters, unities of dialogue with imagination/expectation; similarly in the Homeric oral tradition the succession of actions and facts referring to a character/hero/god would change order depending on where the story was told, to which kind of audience, and in which occasion.
But unlike oral tradition, the score of the Six Miniatures proceed their execution (oral form), and yet in most oral mythologies there comes a moment when a mysterious book is mentioned as their origin; and indeed they often take the form of a book later, as if to connect the alpha with the omega. A great challenge for the executors is to find a way to quote the score inside the execution.
The subsequent possibility suggested would be to re-write them post-executionem; the musicians or the audience, even the author himself could fix their flow on paper just after the listening as a further transitory form of their oral passage, after which the cycle could be repeated.
The power of such dynamism in oral tradition has generated a mythology that bridges the subconscious of centuries of individuals. The process of telling the music instead of playing it offers the executors, audience and author the possibility to draw directly from mythopoeia of language, and to experience what happens when, swallowed the score, their voice becomes expression of multiple identities of mythical raw forces yet without name.
Instrumentation
fl, ob, cl, trp, trb, 2vln, vla, vlc
CategoryChamber Works
PremierePremiered by the dissonArt ensemble at the 48th Dimitria Festival, 2013.
Movements6 movements
Commissioned by / Dedicated toDedicated to the dissonArt ensemble .
PDF for promotional useMore Archive number
MF36340
