Commissioned by Wendy Holdaway and the
Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras
(gracias a Rodrigo Sigal)
First performance:
May 9, 2012
Morelia, Mexico
CMMAS Bassoon Festival
Wendy Holdaway, bassoon
Title from Octavio Paz: Ustica
(from Piedra del Sol – 1958-61)
Rocas color de azufre,
Altas piedras adustas.
Tü estás a mi costado.
Tus pensamientos son negros y dorados.
winter is when snakes
turn into garter belts and greater & greater wind
welts up in us in
creases of white
needles of ice seed in our eyes
sift ether into ditches
thats when air hardens
to whale bone wraps us up
in girdles and the sky rings
our lives in pewter & silver
plate irons our days smooth as Dresden
the blue-in-June lakes are eyes lidded shut
with silver coins or the czarina’s jewel
boxes clasped in the knuckle
popping cold of the winter
palace and its glass eyes
dangle from ivory lace
& the air tinkles like cut glass
Dennis Cooley
Commissioned by Esther Lamneck.
Commissioned by the Mexican Center for Music and Sonic
Arts for pianist Duane Cochran.
Perdido en las transparancias
voy de reflejo a fulgor,
pero no veo al sol.
Octavio Paz
For about the past ten years I have been composing, on and off, a number of pieces for solo piano, variously named preludes and bagatelles. This piece, Einklang, came out of that project, and started life in 2006 when I thought of expanding the collection to include a prelude for two pianos. I worked on the piece on and off for a while, until it became clear that it had grown beyond an entity that I felt could reasonably be described as either a prelude or bagatelle. I gave it a working title of “Sonata for Two Pianos”, but that really never felt like more than a placeholder as I continued to work on the piece.
What attracted me in particular to the medium of two pianos was the myriad of possible sonorities and contrapuntal textures that were simply not available on a single instrument. In particular I came to focus during the compositional process on exploring rhythmic unisons between the two instruments, and on some of the possible chords and lines that could be achieved with that technique. The work’s title Einklang, meaning variously unison, accord, concord, harmony, sympathy, grew out of this approach.
The Bagatelles are on ongoing series of piano works.
The title of this piece comes from the poem The Mummy by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935).
My anxieties tumble
Down a flight of stairs.
My desires swing
In the middle of a vertical garden
The Mummy’s position is absolutely exact.
Music in the distance,
Far off in the distance,
So that life will pass
And gathering forget its gathering.
Translation © 1998 by Richard Zenith
Vertical Garden was written for flautist Alejandro Escuer. The time to composer this work was made available with the assistance of a Major Arts Grant from the Manitoba Arts Council, whose support is gratefully acknowledged.
Fantasy/Nocturne was written as a type of homage to Chopin. I have looked at some of his work through a series of filters, some more distorted than others. The idea for this was suggested by the work’s commissioner, pianist Corey Hamm. The commission was made possible with financial assistance from the Canada Council.
The music for this piece is taken from my work of the same title, written for actor and cello, with text by Per Brask. In its original form, Ernst Toller: Requiem for an Idea is a work of approximately 30 minutes duration. In it writer Per Brask has used excerpts from Toller’s writings as an entry point for a consideration of the meaning of the author’s life and death.
Ernst Toller was born on 1st December 1893 – into a Jewish family in Samotschin in what at that time was the Prussian province of Posen. A typical child of his age, he joined the First World War as a belligerent patriot and returned from the trenches a pacifist. In the Bavarian Revolution, the 25-year-old was a member of the ‘braintrust’ of Kurt Eisner, who he had met in Berlin in 1917. In the course of the complex events in Bavaria, he was drawn into the phalanx of the revolutionaries.
Following the failure of the Räterepublik (a form of republic governed by commissars that existed in Bavaria in 1919), he was sentenced to five years imprisonment, which he spent in the prisons of Stadelheim, Eichstätt, Neuburg on the Danube and above all in Niederschönenfeld. It was here that he wrote his most significant works and gained his reputation as a dramatist. His plays were translated into 27 different languages and performed on the most important stages in the world.
After his release from prison, Toller invested all his energy into his humanitarian and socialist ideals. The political questions with which he concerned himself until his death are worryingly topical today: the problem of the pacifism, which for him arose from the fact that under certain circumstances violence can be as inevitable as it is morally unacceptable; the protection of human rights, the rise of the radical right.
As early as the end of the twenties, Toller was already prophesying that Hitler would come to power, never to relinquish it. His comment in London on Hitler’s Olympic statement in 1936: “The dictator who praises the peace today, does so to prepare the war of tomorrow.”
In exile from 1933 onwards, Ernst Toller tried to reverse the splintering of political forces. In the USA he became the most-listened-to and celebrated representative of a different Germany. He used his popularity to serve gigantic aid projects for the suffering civilian population in Spain. Inevitably, Toller experienced the defeat of the Spanish Republic as one more betrayed revolution. He warned that for Hitler, the civil war in Spain was a dress rehearsal for a European war. His appeals for the western democracies to intervene went unheard. The recognition of Franco’s fascist dictatorship by the western powers shook Toller to be core because he himself was never willing to exclude ethical considerations from the political actions. The lack of conscience in politics drove Toller to despair. Everything that he had fought for in his literary and political life was lost.
On 19th May 1939, three days after Franco’s victory parade in Madrid, Ernst Toller took his own life in New York. Wolfgang Frühwald expressed the opinion that this ultimate demonstration of liberty illustrated – to a repressed world – to what act its freedom of action had meanwhile been reduced.
Writer Per Brask offers the following notes:
It has not been my intention to give an account of the life and times of Ernst Toller — though that certainly would be an interesting project — nor to interrogate, as they say, his plays. Instead, I have wanted to ruminate along with him, to mourn the death of an idea, the idea of individualist socialism, anarchist communitarianism. For him this idea died in 1939 and he chose to die with it. For some of us maybe the idea died — or metamorphosed — in the 1980s, 90s?
Most of the poem is based on material found in Ernst Toller Gesammelte Werke Band 1-5, herausgegeben von John M. Spalek und Wolfgang Frühwald; München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1978. I must, however, warn you that I have been very free in my approach to translating Toller’s words, many of which I have purposefully mangled, twisted and turned to suit my own ends, in some cases well beyond recognition. Sentences have been removed from their contexts. Indeed, in some instances a phrase has been joined by a sub-clause from a very different work.. (Everything written within wide margins has been maltreated in one or more of these ways.) And all this to find — as an actor might put it — the Toller inside myself, to pay homage to Toller by means of appropriation — by using him as an archetype.
The world premier of this suite was given in Lviv, Ukraine, on October 13, 1999, as part of the Contrasts Festival of Contemporary Music. The cellist was Paul Marleyn.
The music for Ernst Toller — Requiem for an Idea was written with financial assistance from the Manitoba Arts Council, whose support is gratefully acknowledged.
The title of this piece comes from a poem by the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938).
SIERRA
An invisible hand
silently caresses
the sad pulp
of the rolling worlds.
Someone, I don’t know who,
has steeped my heart
in sweetness.
In the August snow
the blossom of the peach tree —
early flowering —
opens to the sun.
Stretched out on the sierra’s
ochre ridge,
a frozen
woman of granite;
the wind howls
the grief of her lonely bosom.
Butterflies
of moon
sip
her frozen
breasts
by night.
An on my eyelids,
a tear swells
older than my body.(translated from the Spanish by Rachel Benson)
This work was commissioned by Harry Sparnaay, and is respectfully dedicated to him.
Postlude began life as a member of a projected set of Bagatelles (of which two have been completed and several others are in progress). During the composition process this work seemed to grow of its own accord into a duration and character which made it no longer suitable for inclusion in the set. As such it has become an independent piece. The title is a reflection of my sense of the character of the work. The music feels and sounds to me as though it emerges in the wake of something which itself is vague and undefined; the piece emerges from and returns to this unknown place. Postlude was commissioned by and is dedicated to my good friend Peter Vinograde.