10.06.10
Schnee

Hans Abrahamsen's musical reflections on snow, performed by Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen with Pierre-André Valade conducting.

Thursday the 10th of June 2010 – 9:00pm
Teater Republique, Østerfælled Torv 37, 2100 København Ø

Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen

Pierre-André Valade – chief conductor
Karen Skriver Zarganis, flute
Martin Brommann, oboe/cor anglais
Anna Klett, clarinet
Mathias Friis-Hansen, percussion
Anne Marie Fjord Abildskov, piano 1
Manuel Esperilla. piano 2
Kirstine Futtrup, violin
Ida Speyer Grøn, viola
Øistein Sonstad, cello

Tickets at the door an hour before the concert starts or at Billetten.dk
Standard: 80 kr.
Members of Club Republique: 30 kr. – please show Publique-card when buying tickets.

> Click here to buy tickets for Schnee

Athelas New Music Festival 2010 is grateful for the co-operation of Juhl-Sørensen A/S

The concert is made possible by grants from the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Foundation, the Wilhelm Hansen Foundation and the Beckett Foundation.

The concert will be broadcast on DR P2

Media partner: Danmarks Radio – The National Danish Broadcasting Corporation

Hans Abrahamsen on Schnee:

“At the beginning of the nineties, I arranged some canons by Johann Sebastian Bach for ensemble – a total of seven pieces, ranging across his whole creative life. I was completely immersed in this music, and arranged it with the idea that it should be repeated many, many times – as a sort of minimal music. What lengths Bach had in mind I didn’t know, but for me, looking at the canons in this way opened up a new, animated world of time in circulation.

Depending on how one looks at these canons, the music stands still, or moves forwards or backwards. As for my own work, a further idea crystallised: to write a piece that consists of canonic motion, and explores the universe of time. When ensemble recherche asked me to write a piece for the Wittener Tage, I knew that now was the right time.

One idea for Canon 1a was to present a process where two phrases in canon are gradually interchanged by means of an increasingly close stretto. So the initial phrase becomes the closing phrase, and vice versa – rather like the world of Escher’s pictures, where a white foreground on a black background on one side of the picture becomes a black foreground on a white background on the other.

Another idea was to divide the nine musicians into two symmetrical but rather different groups, on either side of the percussionist in the middle. So Group 1, with violin, viola, cello and piano, is placed to the left, and Group 2, with flute, clarinet, oboe and a second piano, to the right.

When I saw these novel, quasi three-dimensional pictures at the start of the nineties, I was very interested, and especially by the old stereoscopic technique from the late 19th century, where two almost identical pictures, photographed with just a small spatial displacement between them (like two stereo microphones), are placed next to one another. If one looks at them in an unfocussed way, one sees a magical three-dimensional picture in the middle, as the sum of the other two.

So now I played with the idea of whether this was also possible in music, given that it already happens naturally through our listening with two ears. But might it also arise when one hears a repeated figure (as in Bach’s C major prelude from The Well-Tempered Piano, part I), or perhaps within a large-scale formal repetition (such as Bach’s Contrapunctus 13a and 13b from The Art of Fugue, where the second is an inversion of the first)? If one laid two ‘times’ over one another, would a deeper, three-dimensional time be created?

At any rate, that’s what I attempt here, partly on a small scale, as in the repetitions of Canon 1a, and partly on a large one, since Canon 1b is a ‘double’ of 1a (which is for Group 1), but this time for all nine instruments. It is basically the same music, but with many more canonic levels superimposed. So the two form a pair, and should be heard as such. They are like two big musical pictures which, heard with distant, unfocussed ears, may produce a third, three-dimensional picture.

Straight after the premiere of Canon 1a and 1b in Witten in 2006, it was clear to me that Schnee had to be expanded to a bigger series of pairs. There needed to be five pairs. It had to be five pairs, because it was my intention to make the pairs shorter and shorter. The first pair lasts 2 times 9 minutes, so I conceived the following pairs in terms of 2 times 7 minutes, 2 times 5 minutes, 2 times 3 minutes, and 2 times one minute. Finally, time runs out, just as that of our lives runs ever faster to its end. This was my initial vision, and the temporal ideal; the execution turned out a bit differently, and Canons 3a and 3b in particular got longer.

The pairs 2, 3, 4 and 5 that follow the first one are based on the same haiku-like ideas as Pair 1. Again, in the course of each individual canon a gradual process is revealed: one that sheds light on various aspects, each pushed into either the foreground or the background. At the same time, each canon has its ‘double’, where it is heard in a different version.

This pair-wise rhythm is gently interrupted by three intermezzi, in which the strings and winds are tuned down microtonally, so that bit by bit, an ever greater tonal interference arises between groups and pairs of instruments. For example, in Canonic Pair 4 – a salute to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (I borrowed his marvellous ‘Schellen’ (sleigh bells) from his German Dance Die Schlittenfahrt, K. 605, N° 3) – flute, clarinet and of course the two pianos are normally tuned, whereas the cello and cor anglais are tuned 1/6th-tone lower, and the violin and viola 2/6th-tones lower.

Perhaps these are rather cold, formal considerations, but for me they are bound up with the poetic world of the piece: a representation of snow and white polyphony.

Yesterday, by chance, I was in a bookshop, and I picked up a book of Gerhard Richter‘s pictures in grey; immediately, I felt a great affinity with my polyphonic Snow-Canons in white.”

(Translation: Richard Toop)

 

 

 

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