Trazos II, für grosses Orchester mit zwei Klavieren und zwei Harfen im Vierteltonabstand

Trazos II

for large orchestra with two pianos and two harps in quarter-tone (2020)

Commissioned by the Festival Wien Modern 2020 for the RSO Radio Symphonie Orchester, Vienna

Premiere: RSO Vienna, Wien Modern opening concert at Konzerthaus Vienna, large Hall, October 30, 2020

Duration: 14’ ca.

Trazos II for large orchestra shares some premises with Trazos für string trio, piano and live-electronics (2019). First, the exploration of microtonal relations based on systematic scale and chord constructions. Different approaches are found before in Lot for clarinets, trombone and feedback tubes (2018) based on overtone spectra, in Cuerdas for piano solo (2018) based on multiphonics and in Arco for 2 pianos in quarter-tone (1995) with several other means. This is not new, and in my opinion also not enough as a basis for a piece. Nevertheless, I found the first attempts to model chord structures with the computer, playing them with a simple sine wave synthesizer fascinating. I spent many hours systematically building up quarter tone interval sequences that cross the entire register, and learning to perceive their specific qualities. I finally internalized these exercises as music. In both pieces the experience of scanning and listening as part of an exploration process is reflected in the form. The first part of Trazos II is based on stacked intervals building chords and timbral mixtures. In each section the basis interval grows by a quarter-tone and the range widens, exploring the entire register and the timber spectrum of the orchestra. The formal development mirrors the exploration process of the material.

Secondly, the re-discovery and re-evaluation of variation as a fundamental formal device. Its relation to self-generating sequences and formalized pitch structures has been a growing interest since the music theater work Reise nach Comala (2015-17). There is an immanent link to older musical forms –specially of the baroque– that I find in strong resonance with contemporary music. Among all timeless, perception-driven formal devices in music, variation is perhaps the most important. Micro-temporal phenomena experienced in electronic music such as resonance, de-correlation and beating open up multiple fields for variation, also in the context of instrumental music. The orchestra offers an ideal field for such investigations. This interest in pure musical issues reflects also a growing uneasiness: in times of overexcited narratives I see a tendency to functionalizing sound for immediate impact, and a loss of interest in the exploration of fundamental musical and formal phenomena.

Thirdly, the search after clarity and reduction, after a music imagined as an art of light. This is already difficult to achieve in chamber music. In the context of a microtonal piece for large orchestra it becomes much more difficult and appears even as a contradictory venture. Retrospectively seen, it remains an open task, a concern that mirrors the yearning for a life that avoids the superfluous and leaves time and space for what really matters. Perhaps the years of experience with electronic music pay here a unexpected tribute as well: to be completely honest I’m sick of noise.

But what Trazos II finally triggered was a farewell. And it triggered itself a process of recollection: of places, situations, sensations, of the early unencumbered experience of an exuberant nature, and, above all, of persons. In several other pieces I had started a dialogue with the work of others as a way to indirectly reflect on questions relevant to my own existence. Above all – and because of living in a foreign language – the question of what language is, of how it determines what we are and the world we live in, and the struggle to find one. In this piece something different happened. I tried to find back my first regard to certain persons and things and to retain it while writing. I realize: before art becomes concept, structure and form it emerges from most precise and honest in-sight.

Finally, these pieces are an attempt to redefine my own experience of writing music. «To draw lines», as Claire Parnet and Gilles Deleuze say in their «Dialogues». Composing as a direct, subjective, open ended and nevertheless stringent process, a balance between accuracy and uncertainty.

Hofstatt, December 2022