Composer Osvaldo Golijov writes, "I wrote Tenebrae (2002) as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it 'from afar', the music would probably offer a 'beautiful' surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin's Troisieme Leçon de Tenebrae, using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture. The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem." Watch a performance of Osvaldo Golijov's Tenebrae by the Odeon Quartet . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

In writing about his dance film Blue Yellow (1995), director Adam Roberts writes, "Sylvie Guillem, the celebrated ballerina, asked Jonathan Burrows and I to make a dance film. The film would be included in a prime time experiment to be called Evidentia, funded by BBC 2 and France 2. The film is called blue yellow after the Mattisse’s painting Intérieur jaune et bleu, 1946. This colour scheme inspired my design and much of the pictorial composition. Inevitably, being neither a dancer nor a choreographer, I felt rather removed from the choreographic process, and so decided that I should reflect this is the form of the film. I also wanted to consolidate ideas I had first tried out on a film called Very, where I had explored and made overt the very fragmentary nature of my untutored, subjective experience of dance. The aim would be to make it a task for a viewer of the film to imagine the space and the continuity of movement – so that the dance, if it exists at all, exists and is held in the mind of the viewer. The filming took two days, and the editing about a week. Kevin Volans suggested using a section of one of his string quartets which we cut up an interspersed through the film. At first we laid out the sections at regular intervals, but, as with all editing, human judgment finds some coincidences more pleasing than others. Hugh Strain at De Lane Lea sound studios achieved a perfect sound mix, foregrounding the music, as if it were, “this side” of the door. In broad terms, the film tries, by means of patterning and rhythm, to maintain interest in what is glimpsed through a door, and sometimes allows a pause long enough but unobtrusive enough to satisfy a kind of longing, even if such stolen moments must only ever be brief. Watch Blue Yellow with dancer Sylvie Guillem and music by Kevin Volans . . . it's this week's DANSES PYTHEUSES.

"Elliott Schwartz's music combines so many disparate elements that it moves beyond eclecticism into its own genre - multifaceted yet self-contained. Schwartz's music is virtuosic for the performer, challenging to the listener, yet, for the most part, he eschews the spiky Modernist shield that less secure composers use to dissuade all comers. His work combines tonal and nontonal elements, improvised and fully notated passages and unusual instrumental effects (plucking the inside of a piano, stratospheric squeals for the woodwinds, and so on) in an idiosyncratic manner that is Mr. Schwartz's own." (Tim Page/The New York Times) Hear a performance of Elliott Schwartz's Souvenir (1978) for clarinet and piano, featuring clarinetist Jerome Bunke and the composer as pianist . . . one of this week's PYTHEAS EARFULS.

"Manuel de Falla wrote his Harpsichord Concerto (1926) for Wanda Landowska, the pioneering Polish-French harpsichordist who had been urging her contemporaries to write new music for her chosen instrument. In this Concerto for six solo instruments, 'the composer felt no constraint to conform to the classic form of the concerto for a single instrument with the accompaniment of the orchestra,' Falla wrote in a note for the premiere. This austere, stripped down style – of 'the esthetic which is ascetic,' in Alexis Roland-Manuel’s words – is similar to that of contemporary works such as Stravinsky’s L'histoire du soldat, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, or the chamber symphonies of Schoenberg." (John Henken/Los Angeles Philharmonic). Hear a performance of Falla's brilliant Harpsichord Concerto . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

Explore, Listen and Enjoy!
Vinny Fuerst
Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music