Quartet for the End of Time

Olivier Messiaen

1909-1992, France

"In his Guide to Chamber Music, Melvin Berger calls Olivier Messiaen a person who always went his own way. Starting at age eight, he taught himself to play the piano and to compose. At the Paris Conservatoire, he garnered all the traditional prizes, even as he devoted himself to the study of complex Hindu rhythmic patterns and became proficient in recognizing and notating bird songs and sounds-two skills that profoundly influenced his musical style. But the overriding inspiration for many of his most important compositions derives from his profound religiosity, and from his deep, mystical attachment to the Catholic Church.

Throughout his years as church organist, teacher, member of the French Army in World War 2 (including 2 years in a German prisoner of war camp, and professor, Messiaen continued to compose music.  He produced an impressive list of major orchestral works along with many choral, piano and organ compositions.

Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time is judged by many to be his finest work, one of the most important of all twentieth-century chamber compositions and perhaps the most significant piece of music to come out of the experience of World War 2.  While imprisoned in Silesia, he turned to composing to help him survive what he termed the "cruelty and horrors of the camp."  The unusual scoring of this piece was determined by the talents of fellow prisoners-a violinist, a clarinetist, a cellist-with himself as pianist. The four men first performed the quartet before an audience of 5,000 other inmates on January 15th, 1941. "Never," Messiaen later said, "was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension."

Messiaen based the quartet on a quotation from the Revelation of St. John, Chapter X, verses 1 to 7, which follows below along with the composer's description of the music.

"I saw a mighty angel descend from heaven, clad in mist; and a rainbow was upon his head. His face was like the sun, his feet like pillars of fire. He set his right foot on the seas his left foot on the earth, and standing thus on sea and earth he lifted his hand to heaven and swore by Him who liveth for ever and ever, saying There shall be no time longer; but on the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel, the mystery of God shall be finished."

1 Liturgy of crystal

Between the morning hours of three and four, the awakening of the birds; a thrush or a nightingale soloist improvises, amid notes of shining sound and a halo of trills that lose themselves high in the trees. Transpose this to the religious plane; you will have the harmonious silence of heaven.  The piano provides a rhythmic ostinato based on unequal augmentations and diminutions-the clarinet unfolds a bird song

2 Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time.

The first and third parts (very short) evoke the power of that mighty angel, his hair a rainbow and his clothing mist, who places one foot on the sea and one foot on the earth. Between these sections are the ineffable harmonies of heaven. From the piano, soft cascades of blue-orange chord, encircling with their distant carillon the plainchant-like recacitivo of the violin and cello.

3 Abyss of the birds 

Clarinet solo. The abyss in Time, with its sadness and tedium. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant outpourings of song! Thee is a great contrast between the desolation of Time (the abyss) and the joy of the bird-songs (desire of the eternal light).

4 Interlude

Scherzo. Of a more outgoing character than the other movements, but related to them nonetheless by various melodic references.

5 Praise to the Eternity of Jesus

Jesus is here considered as one with the Word. A long phrase, infinitely slow, by the cello, expiates with love and reverence on the everlastingness of the Word. Majestically the melody unfolds itself at a distance both intimate and awesome. "In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God."

6 Dance of fury, for the 7 trumpets

Rhythmically the most idiosyncratic movement of the set. The four instruments in unison give the effect of gongs and trumpets (the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse attend various catastrophes, the trumpets  of the seventh angel announces the consummation of the mystery of God). Use of extended note values (and) augmented or diminished rhythmic patterns. Music of stone, formidable sonority; movement as irresistible as steel, as huge blocks of livid fury or icelike frenzy. Listen particularly to the terrifying fortissimo of the theme in augmentation and with change of register of its different notes, toward the end of the piece.

7 Cluster of rainbows for the Angel who announces the end of time

Here certain passages from the second movement return. The mighty angel appears, and in particular the rainbow that envelopes him (the rainbow, symbol of peace, wisdom, of every quiver of luminosity and sound). In my dreaming I hear and see ordered melodies and chords, familiar hues and forms; then, following this transitory stage I pass into the unreal and submit ecstatically to a vortex, a dizzying interpenetration of superhuman sounds and colors. These fiery swords, these rivers of blue-orange lava, these sudden stars. Behold the cluster, behold the rainbows!

8 Praise to the Immortality of Jesus

Expansive violin solo balancing the cello solo of the fifth movement. Why this second glorification? It addresses itself more specifically to the second aspect of Jesus-to Jesus the man, to the Word made flesh, raised up immortal from the dead so as to communicate his life to us.  It is total love.  Its slow rising to a supreme point is the ascension of man toward his God, of the son of God toward his Father, of the mortal newly made divine toward paradise.

And I repeat anew: All this is mere striving and childish stammering if one compares it to the overwhelming grandeur of the subject! "

Quartet for the End of Time

This article is taken from "Minnesota Dance", the periodical of the Minnesota Dance Alliance, March/April 1990 Vol. XI No. 4

"Remembering Margret Dietz"
written by Judith Mirus in collaboration with Irina Lasoff

Margret Dietz had a great influence on the Minnesota dance scene. Though her time in Minnesota was brief (1966 – 72), the strength of her teaching and her gifts to dance continue to enrich the lives of those she touched. Margret was my teacher for ten years, and also my very good friend — she challenged me, sustained me, and sometimes, leaned on me. JM

 

Biographical Information:
Margret Dietz was born June 3, 1913, in Berlin, Germany. At the age of nine, as a young piano student waiting for her turn to perform, she accidentally wandered into a rehearsal studio where Mary Wigman was dancing. Immediately she knew she wanted to be a dancer. Unfortunately, a crippling joint infection delayed the beginning of her study of dance for nine more years. During this time, she studied costume and stage design, history of music and dance (under Curt Sachs), and philosophy (under Paul Tillich). When the bone disease was finally cured, she went to the Mary Wigman Schule in Dresden, where she studied from 1932 – 39, eventually becoming Wigman’s teaching associate. From 1939 – 53, she taught in the Wigman school, performed as a member of Wigman’s Dance Group and also as a soloist, and directed several performing dance groups in Berlin.

In 1953, she accepted an invitation to teach dance at the University of Illinois. She taught there for three years, then at the University of California/Santa Barbara for four years. From 1953 – 57, she was a faculty member of the celebrated Connecticut College Summer Festival of Dance, along with Lucas Hoving, Daniel Nagrin, Ruth Currier, and Charles Weidman. She traveled to Berlin to assist Mary Wigman in 1959 – 61, then returned to the United States to DePauw University for five years, and in 1966, moved to Minnesota.

 

She chaired the Dance Department at the University of Minnesota, and was a guest teacher at Nancy Hauser’s Guild of Performing Arts. In 1969, Margret Dietz, along with four younger dancers — Judith Mirus, Linda Osborne, Terry Stoner, and Marie Winkler — formed a dance company called CHOREOGRAM. In June, 1972, in the first week of the third annual Choreogram summer dance residency at the College of St Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota, Margret Dietz passed away.

 

I invited Irina Lasoff, who worked closely with Margret and with Choreogram, to share with me in "Remembering Margret Dietz".

 

JM: Since it has been more than seventeen years since Margret’s death, there are many people in today’s Minnesota dance community who probably do not know anything about her. Where should we start in talking about this special person?

IL: When you say seventeen years, I can’t believe it. She’s still so vivid in my mind. I’ll see a dance concert or a play or read a book, and think, "Well, Margret, what do you think of that?" It’s very hard to separate her personality from her work as a teacher and as a choreographer — with Margret everything was all bound up together.

 

JM: That was both one of the most difficult things to sort out after she died. Everyone had a unique relationship with Margret. As we continued with the company and the school, it was hard to separate out the things about her teaching (which we were all still trying to follow together) from the individual personal memories.

 

IL: I think the Hitler years formed Margret to a great extent. She was just twenty years old when Hitler came to power. She chose to stay in Germany because her parents were there — her father was in a concentration camp for a number of years — and I think to maintain her integrity, she had to constantly restate it in some way, so that she often felt embattled. Margret was not an easy person. There was a core of rigidity in her — but at the same time there was such a clarity of thought and purpose, and such a strength… tempered by kindness!

 

JM: The day I met Margret, on my first day at DePauw University in the early 60’s, was probably THE most fortunate day of my life. Up to that time. I wasn’t really looking forward to my adult life. Then I began to have a daily exposure to Margret. She was the first teacher to demand of me that I not just settle for what I could do well and easily. Her attitude was, "Yes, that was good, but it was not all that you are capable of." It took me a long time to really learn to dance, but the challenge she offered and the many new worlds she uncovered, that captured me.

IL: I remember very vividly the first class I took with her. It was at Nancy(Hauser)’s studio on Prior Avenue. It was and evening class, and the lighting in the studio was very dim… and Margret came in, and she started to talk, and it was as if all the lights became a little brighter. She had that quality — she always brought an intensification of an atmosphere with her. I still remember what she taught — she taught circles… and she varied them with vibrations. Now, we had done circles and vibrations a lot… and I don’t suppose that Margret taught them so differently — I think it was just her personality. That’s what I mean when I say the person is hard to distinguish from the teacher. The material was very simple, but she demanded total commitment to a phrase, and it didn’t matter whether you had been dancing for ten years, or whether you had never danced — she could forgive errors in steps or in techniques but…

 

JM: … but if you weren’t paying attention, or weren’t putting out 100 percent… that was unforgivable.

 

IL: Unforgivable! She demanded that you be connected to yourself at all times.

 

JM: I remember how Margret’s classes always unfolded so effortlessly and yet so miraculously. They moved seamlessly without a break, you just didn’t notice when you had entered something else…

 

IL: That was part of her brilliant, logical mind!

 

JM: Whether she had planned it that way, or whether it was just her intuition, they were always so integrated… and so organic… from beginning to end.

 

IL: Most of her movement — compared to what people do now — was simple. Dancers were not as technically advanced then. If she had lived longer, it would have been interesting to see how her classes would have changed…

 

JM: What things come to mind when you think of her as choreographer?

 

IL: Elegance… refinement. I’m thinking of a particular solo dance of hers — it had a great dramatic and lyric quality. And then there was "Quartet" — that first dance she did for the premiere of Choreogram — that was absolutely a jewel. One time I was sitting beside Margret as she watched you all dancing it, and she said, "I just don’t understand how I could have done anything so perfect!" And she was quite right — it was perfect! It required perfect spacing, that was absolutely right at all times.

 

JM: The four of us always had to be symmetrically spaced front to back and side to side all through the dance… it required meticulous attention.

 

IL: Precision! Fantastic precision!

 

JM: We each had to constantly be adjusting our own personal dynamic to fit with the other three dancers… which is something that I had no clue whatsoever how to do at that point in my life! At the same time, there was a lot of footwork that really took some rhythmic attention and articulation. That opening phrase, which was repeated many times throughout the dance, coming in from the four corners with those foot patterns, was very complex…

 

IL: And yet the audience didn’t see something that was complicated. It saw a dance that was… full of air. It felt as if it would be so easy to dance. It had such freshness! Margret’s feeling for space was a "design" feeling, as opposed to a feeling of "weight" in space.

 

JM: Yes, weight was not really a part of Margret’s technique at all.

 

IL: That surprised me. I would have liked to have known what was Mary Wigman’s feeling for it. In Nancy Hauser’s teaching, which also comes from Wigman, weight was such an important part. I always found it fascinating that two such strong teachers should have such differences in relation to the same technical principle. In performing circles, for instance; to Margret precision was of utmost importance; to Nancy the centrifugal force was the main thing.

 

JM: That was confusing for several of us when we were taking classes from both of them during the same session! Later, I began to realize that was one of the strengths of the Wigman approach — the freedom of the individual to find a personal expression related to the material being presented.

 

IL: We haven’t yet mentioned what was one of Margret’s greatest strengths — the teaching of choreographers. I’ve never seen anyone else able to penetrate so well what it was that the student choreographer was trying to say, and to show them how to say it better. There is a tendency, I think, in teaching choreography, to simply change what the young choreographer has done to what the teacher would do — and that happened occasionally with Margret — but I never saw a choreography class of Margret’s without learning something important.

 

JM: When she did use an idea of her own as the base for suggesting what to do, it was usually because a student didn’t yet have a clear focus. By suggesting something very strong of her own to students, it gave them the experience of pursuing something that had the possibility for development. Whereas, if left to their own devices, they may never have felt the magic of having a dance in progress suddenly begin to come alive. When I brought compositions to her, I always had the feeling that her critique was coming to my own dance. I never felt she was trying to, uh…

 

IL: … manipulate the piece?

 

JM: Yes! Did you ever have that feeling?

 

IL: Well, I did have one "run–in" with her when I was doing the "Frescoes" piece for the five of you. I brought one section and she said, "No, that will not do". She wanted it changed in a certain way. And I didn’t agree. I waited until after the rehearsal to talk to her about it. We talked back and forth for quite a while — the conversation was on a surprisingly objective level — and finally, she said, "Well, if you really can’t do it my way, then find a third way."

 

JM: Because she couldn’t accept your way, either?

 

IL: She couldn’t accept what I had done, and I couldn’t accept what she wanted done. I went back to work, thinking "there has to be more than one way to skin a cat." I produced an alternative version and she accepted it. What I learned from this is that there is more than one good way to express an idea — something that I had not realized before!

 

JM: That is a perfect example of what it was to work with, and learn from, Margret. I was in my twenties then — not very sure of my own point of view and still making lots of "life decisions". Every rehearsal and every one of her classes taught me about life. Like that experience of yours — it is a valuable piece of wisdom to know that finding a second solution to a problem does not mean that strength or quality needs to be sacrificed.

 

IL: When she was teaching, Margret used a certain phrase quite often — she would say (after giving someone a brilliant bit of advice), "Now, remember, this is not a recipe." Just another of her guiding statements which can apply to a great number of things.

 

JM: Margret could be quite demanding in many ways, and yet those of us who knew her personally outside of the studio, knew also how vulnerable she was. Many who only knew her at the studio never suspected a moment of vulnerability of fragileness — until she had her heart attack. After that, of course, people were more aware that there were other things…

 

IL: I’ve often thought about her vulnerability. She had such imagination, and sensitivity, and yet she had lived through so much. All those years of living under the Nazi regime, and working in the underground resistance during the war — what all that must have done to this person with such empathy. For her to have had the moral strength to be courageous — the fantastic thing to me is that she came out of it without losing her generosity and her spirit.

 

JM: I think that making a commitment to future generations was the only way she survived. Evidently that was also her father’s experience. I understand that he died within a very short time of being released from the concentration camps.

 

IL: Yes, he died within the year.

 

JM: Just making it through, was the reason to live — to make it out of the camps, to prove that the Nazis could not triumph. Her optimism about the future was how Margret made it through the war — and was how she lived the rest of her life after the war and once she got to America. I think a negative approach would have killed Margret.

 

IL: She once told me that she considered nihilism the easy way out.

 

JM: Since we have the perspective of many years to speak from now, what do you think has been the legacy of Margret Deitz to dance, and to those who know her?

 

IL: She was thoroughly a professional — in her teaching, in her choreography, in her own performing — yet she influenced professionals and non–professionals alike. In fact, I don’t think we have mentioned her work with people who took her evening classes and her Movement Choirs — people of many different ages and abilities. She inspired performances from everyone!

 

JM: Near the end of her life, Margret said that Dance was her way of saying "yes" to life. From this came everything else — her demand for commitment from everyone who danced, her love for every moment of a rehearsal or backstage preparation, as well as for the act of performance. For a person who often declared herself to be "without ambition"… she certainly accomplished a great deal, don’t you think?

 

 

 

 

Quartet for the End of Time

Season tickets available now at:

http://bakkentrio.org/

Abyss of Birds

This movement was written first of the eight and it is the one I performed in Atlanta. It is solo clarinet, very demanding with many long sustained notes weaving the wings of liberation. I wanted something simple to compliment the demands of the clarinetist. Something with the feeling of caligraphy and it's delicate brush strokes. I wanted the figure to spend as much time on the ground as in the clouds, human by choice, divine by nature. Images of chicks breaking out of their shells rose in my awareness as I moved through the themes and worked with the costume elements. There was a sense of nesting dolls, decreasing in size as each is opened. Except this had a sense of the innermost doll breaking through each outer doll and expanding, merging with the larger one each time there was a break through...Like moving through the layers of one's energy field. To a higher frequency or way of being in the world, or a larger world. An expanded sense of awareness/consciousness. Composer's notes: "Unaccompanied clarinet. The abyss is Time, with it's dreariness and gloom. The birds are the opposite of Time; they represent our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song!"

Quartet for the End of Time

http://www.subbody.net/03theory/PractiseGuideframe/practice_guide0Frame_page.htm

Quartet for the End of Time

This is the space at MacPhail. 

The recital starts at 4 pm. We are the second half.

It will be nearly dusk and by the time quartet starts the light will be fading.

When it is finished it will be dark.

The floor is lovely.

No worries about slivers.

The musicians will take stage right and we will have the other space.

There is no possibility for sofisticated lighting,

only on and off.

I like the ledge and use it as "off stage"

Dancers will position themselves like the gargoyles on top of Notre Dame observing the action when they are not involved in the movement.

Quartet for the End of Time

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/04/quartet_for_the_2.html

quartet working drawing 7movt

quartet working drawing 6movt

This movement has always been the biggest challenge for me of the entire piece. The image of the archangels, the flaming swords, the fury,the blood, the destruction... And how to bring that all out in a way that isn't overdone or melodramatic. The music itself is so profound that the movement must be clean and precise without being too busy, ornate. I like the use of the swords and fabric. The fabric alone seemed to stand in front of the music, which isn't what I'm looking for...I want the sense of the musiccarrying the archangels or the archangels riding the music, there are moments when the cherubim or seraphims seem to walk through assisting in the process. I have the image of the earliest phases of the "final solution" before the camps had been constructed and were operating at full efficiency. The Jews were executed "by hand" that is they were shot in the back of the head. Soldiers were told to use only one bullet for each kill which meant point blank. They soldiers had not been trained to kill women and children, elders and had to be given large amounts of alcohol in order to carry out the task. One soldier explained that the only way he could force himself to follow his orders was to start with the parents. He found it easier to murder the children once the parents were dead because there would be no one to care for them. 

quartet working drawing 5bmovt

quartet working drawing 5amovt

quartet working drawing 4movt

Subbody Butoh practice guide

http://www.subbody.net/03theory/PractiseGuideframe/practice_guide0Frame_page.htm

quartet working drawing 2movt

quartet working drawing 1movt

Quartet for the End of Time

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/04/quartet_for_the_2.html

Quartet for the End of Time

Olivier Messiaen

1909-1992, France

"In his Guide to Chamber Music, Melvin Berger calls Olivier Messiaen a person who always went his own way. Starting at age eight, he taught himself to play the piano and to compose. At the Paris Conservatoire, he garnered all the traditional prizes, even as he devoted himself to the study of complex Hindu rhythmic patterns and became proficient in recognizing and notating bird songs and sounds-two skills that profoundly influenced his musical style. But the overriding inspiration for many of his most important compositions derives from his profound religiosity, and from his deep, mystical attachment to the Catholic Church.

Throughout his years as church organist, teacher, member of the French Army in World War 2 (including 2 years in a German prisoner of war camp, and professor, Messiaen continued to compose music.  He produced an impressive list of major orchestral works along with many choral, piano and organ compositions.

Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time is judged by many to be his finest work, one of the most important of all twentieth-century chamber compositions and perhaps the most significant piece of music to come out of the experience of World War 2.  While imprisoned in Silesia, he turned to composing to help him survive what he termed the "cruelty and horrors of the camp."  The unusual scoring of this piece was determined by the talents of fellow prisoners-a violinist, a clarinetist, a cellist-with himself as pianist. The four men first performed the quartet before an audience of 5,000 other inmates on January 15th, 1941. "Never," Messiaen later said, "was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension."

Messiaen based the quartet on a quotation from the Revelation of St. John, Chapter X, verses 1 to 7, which follows below along with the composer's description of the music.

"I saw a mighty angel descend from heaven, clad in mist; and a rainbow was upon his head. His face was like the sun, his feet like pillars of fire. He set his right foot on the seas his left foot on the earth, and standing thus on sea and earth he lifted his hand to heaven and swore by Him who liveth for ever and ever, saying There shall be no time longer; but on the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel, the mystery of God shall be finished."

1 Liturgy of crystal

Between the morning hours of three and four, the awakening of the birds; a thrush or a nightingale soloist improvises, amid notes of shining sound and a halo of trills that lose themselves high in the trees. Transpose this to the religious plane; you will have the harmonious silence of heaven.  The piano provides a rhythmic ostinato based on unequal augmentations and diminutions-the clarinet unfolds a bird song

2 Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time.

The first and third parts (very short) evoke the power of that mighty angel, his hair a rainbow and his clothing mist, who places one foot on the sea and one foot on the earth. Between these sections are the ineffable harmonies of heaven. From the piano, soft cascades of blue-orange chords, encircling with their distant carillon the plainchant-like recitativo of the violin and cello.

3 Abyss of the birds 

Clarinet solo. The abyss in Time, with its sadness and tediums. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant outpourings of song! Thee is a great contrast between the desolation of Time (the abyss) and the joy of the bird-songs (desire of the eternal light).

4 Interlude

Scherzo. Of a more outgoing character than the other movements, but related to them nonetheless by various melodic references.

5 Praise to the Eternity of Jesus

Jesus is here considered as one with the Word. A long phrase, infinitely slow, by the cello, expiates with love and reverence on the everlastingness of the Word. Majestically the melody unfolds itself at a distance both intimate and awesome. "In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God."

6 Dance of fury, for the 7 trumpets

Rhythmically the most idiosyncratic movement of the set. The four instruments in unison give the effect of gongs and trumpets (the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse attend various catastrophes, the trumpets  of the seventh angel announces the consummation of the mystery of God). Use of extended note values (and) augmented or diminished rhythmic patterns. Music of stone, formidable sonority; movement as irresistible as steel, as huge blocks of livid fury or icelike frenzy. Listen particularly to the terrifying fortissimo of the theme in augmentation and with change of register of its different notes, toward the end of the piece.

7 Cluster of rainbows for the Angel who announces the end of time

Here certain passages from the second movement return. The mighty angel appears, and in particular the rainbow that envelopes him (the rainbow, symbol of peace, wisdom, of every quiver of luminosity and sound). In my dreamings I hear and see ordered melodies and chords, familiar hues and forms; then, following this transitory stage I pass into the unreal and submit ecstatically to a vortex, a dizzying interpenetration of superhuman sounds and colors. These fiery swords, these rivers of blue-orange lava, these sudden stars. Behold the cluster, behold the rainbows!

8 Praise to the Immortality of Jesus

Expansive violin solo balancing the cello solo of the fifth movement. Why this second glorification? It addresses itself more specifically to the second aspect of Jesus-to Jesus the man, to the Word made flesh, raised up immortal from the dead so as to communicate his life to us.  It is total love.  Its slow rising to a supreme point is the ascension of man toward his God, of the son of God toward his Father, of the mortal newly made divine toward paradise.

And I repeat anew: All this is mere striving and childish stammering if one compares it to the overwhelming grandeur of the subject! "

quartet for the end of time

This is the space at MacPhail. 

The recital starts at 4 pm. We are the second half.

It will be nearly dusk and by the time quartet starts the light will be fading.

When it is finished it will be dark.

The floor is lovely.

No worries about slivers.

The musicians will take stage right and we will have the other space.

There is no possibility for sofisticated lighting,

only on and off.

I like the ledge and use it as "off stage"

Dancers will position themselves like the gargoyles on top of Notre Dame observing the action when they are not involved in the movement.

Quartet 1st movement choreography

It is just before dawn. Songbirds are beginning to wake and declare their territories. The bird figures shift vertically as if sitting high in the trees and then as if on the ground searching for nourishment. Wary of predators, watching for their mates or potential mates. It is a quiet scene one that seems to celebrate existence in spite of pain, and death. there are 3 or 4 dancers active, each playing off the sound and rhythm of an instrument: piano, clarinet and violin. There is minimal movement through the space, most of the gestures involve the wings head, neck and the shifting levels of the figures. There is a movement reminiscent of bathing birds fluffing their feathers.

season tickets 09-10

Season tickets available now at:

http://bakkentrio.org/

composer's preface

Subject of the Composition and Commentary on Each Movement

"And I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow on his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire...Setting his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land...and, standing on the sea and on the land, he raised his right hand toward Heaven and swore by He who lives forever and ever....saying: 'There will be no more Time; but in the days when the seventh angel is to blow his trumpet, the mystery of God will be fulfilled.'"

Revelation of Saint John, Chapter 10

Conceived and composed during my captivity, the Quartet for the End of Time was premiered in Stalag VIII A on 15 January 1941, by Jean Le Boulaire, violin; Henri Akoka, clarinet; Etienne Pasquier, cello; and myself at the piano. The piece was directly inspired by the above passage from Revelation. Its musical language is essentially ethereal, spiritual, Catholic. The modes, realizing melodically and harmonically a sort of tonal ubiquity, bring the listener closer to infinity, to eternity in space. The special rhythms, independent of the meter, powerfully contribute to the effect of banishing the temporal. (But given the awesomeness of the subject, all of the above serves merely as inarticulate and tentative explanation!)

This Quartet comprises eight movement. Why? Seven is the perfect number, the Creation in six days sanctified by the divine Sabbath; the seventh day of this repose extends into eternity and becomes the eighth day of eternal light, of unalterable peace.

abyss of birds

This movement was written first of the eight and it is the one I performed in Atlanta. It is solo clarinet, very demanding with many long sustained notes weaving the wings of liberation. I wanted something simple to compliment the demands of the clarinetist. Something with the feeling of caligraphy and it's delicate brush strokes. I wanted the figure to spend as much time on the ground as in the clouds, human by choice, divine by nature. Images of chicks breaking out of their shells rose in my awareness as I moved through the themes and worked with the costume elements. There was a sense of nesting dolls, decreasing in size as each is opened. Except this had a sense of the innermost doll breaking through each outer doll and expanding, merging with the larger one each time there was a break through...Like moving through the layers of one's energy field. To a higher frequency or way of being in the world, or a larger world. An expanded sense of awareness/consciousness. Composer's notes: "Unaccompanied clarinet. The abyss is Time, with it's dreariness and gloom. The birds are the opposite of Time; they represent our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song!"

quartet for the end of time

Abyss of birds, the third movement, composer's notes:

The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.  

The tension created by duality, polar opposites waxing and waning. This particular movement reflects that theme in that the figure spends as much time on floor as in the stars. The slow motion falls, rolling, swirling and ascent repeat with variation. Each fall reflects the opening into a larger reality, a fuller state of awareness or consciousness. With a scarf of wings the image is reminescent of a aboriginal totem pole, figures come to life and moving through space. The original image was a figure with rainbows emiting light from it's hands, and a sense of arcing rays of light. I envisioned the movement of the northern lights across the sky opening and closing, shifting, changing. The brief flutter with the scarf shifting from wings to rope to noose recalls the darkness of the abyss, the sadness and weariness of time and the heaviness of the body, it's dense structure of bones and connective tissues grounding the spirit in the manifest world. The mask accents the eyes and the movement of the eyes. Shifts the identity of the figure from recognizably human to an enigma. The internal rotation of the legs and feet suggest a being unaccostomed to the demands of walking, suggests that this being is more comfortable in another medium, a kinder enviroment, more vulnerable when on land. The feathers of the mask suggest air, the shells indicate water, the costume in motion spirls to creat a vortex which moves around the figure's internal. vertical axis. The falls demand absolute relaxation, complete surrender to gravity, the the magnetic attaraction of the earth, created as our planet turns on it's own axis in space. The ascent which follows needs nothing more than awareness of the rebounding motion of the turning falls and subtle guidance of the rebound. Tension and release, the process of breathing, and singing. The lungs and diaprgm create a vaccum, the air rushes in, the muscles relax and return to their original position. The sound is produced by the changing shapes and the inner structures of the throat and mouth as the air rushes past the vocal cords.

sculpting space

The arm consists of the long humerus bone and the forearm bones, the radius and the ulna. The connection between the humerus and forearm bones forms the elbow joint. The metacarpal bones form the wrist, the carpals form the hand, and the phalanges form the fingers and thumbs. Important bony projections on the humerus serve as locations for muscle and ligament attachments and can also be the sites for injury. When the arm is in the anatomical position (palms up), the medial epicondyle is the rounded part of the bone on the inside of the elbow and the lateral epicondyle is the one on the outside. These two sites are attachment points for the medial and lateral collateral ligaments that hold the humerus to the radius and ulna. They are also the points where many wrist and finger flexor and extensor muscles originate. Since many of these muscles attach at the same site, their tendons (which attach muscle to bone) are often referred to in groups: the common extensor tendons (CET) and the common flexor tendons (CFT).