Avaritia and Superbia are two parts of a seven-movement suite: The Seven Deadly Sins. Written for orchestra, both movements explore unusual playing techniques with a focus on timbre and texture, reflecting the influences of Penderecki and Ligeti. Avaritia (Greed) begins in slightly unidiomatic fashion with non-tonal gestures that suggest a natural undercurrent, specifically, rainfall. The music seeks this impression through unconventional timbral effects, and a series rhythm and pitch organizations based on serial tone rows and modes of limited transposition – scales based on intervallic patterns that yields systematic atonality and a controlled high degree of dissonance (conceived by Olivier Messiaen). This animates a linear-harmonic motion; a timelessness that avoids any melodic progression, generating a sense of unpredictability, and a flux of harmonic possibilities.
The same concept is relayed into Superbia (Pride) which resumes in tempestuous manner that precipitates the forming of highly chromatic harmonies and dense textures. This study in texture is evident in the form of tone clusters and micropolyphony – a disharmonious conflict between instrumental lines suggesting that with greed comes selfishness, competition and pride.
The apathetic greed of man’s grip on the natural world is permeated with an ecological crisis that elicits the brutal bite of Mother Nature. The idea of rainwater running down a window is one of the key elements of inspiration that connects Avaritia/Superbia. It is a metaphor for the expanding and contracting textures which are appropriated to Superbia in the themes of convergence, colouration and dissonance. The experimental and idiosyncratic nature of these two passages heralded the induction of a new instrument into the orchestral environment: the Thunder Tube.
Concert details to follow...
No comments:
Post a Comment