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Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1996-2001) |
soloist (contrabass clarinet, voice, pedal bass drum - as interference) and ensemble of 12 instrumentalists
2030 0000 2perc chamber organ (or synth.) el.gtr 2020
written for the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbræ (“the great art of light and darkness”) is the title of a work on optics and the phases of the moon (but also touching on occult matters) published in 1671 by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. The music is “unfolded” from the solo composition interference, whose title refers to the patterns (of light and darkness) produced by interacting beams of electromagnetic radiation or subatomic particles, as in the famous “two-slit experiment”. This experiment, simple and straightforward in itself, nevertheless has deep and unresolved implications for the nature of physical reality, leading as it does to the mysterious and (presently?) unanswerable question of what is “really happening” at the quantum level of space and time.
Such ideas permeate the structure of the composition in various ways. It is also in another sense a work of speculation, in that the contrabass clarinet is itself a relatively “unknown” instrument, especially in a solo context, bearing in mind the remarkable but isolated contributions of such players as Anthony Braxton and Peter van Bergen. Much of the material evolved out of extensive consultations with Carl Rosman, some of whose other abilities suggested the “prosthetic” extension of the instrument using the player’s voice (with a range of four and a half octaves) and a pedal bass drum. Central to my intentions was to discover or develop a “virtuosity” inherent to the instrument and then extrapolate it to an almost (?) absurd extreme.
Around all this is woven a structure for an ensemble consisting mostly of pairs of instruments, which in general alternate between a polyphonic type of elaboration around the solo part, and a harmonic function akin to a “continuo” group, in which the (electronically-simulated) chamber organ plays an important role. An opening vocal solo is succeeded by a highly intricate canon (by augmentation, using the proportions 2:3:4:5: 6:10:15:30 ) whose strands rotate and eclipse each other like the elements of a mechanical solar system. At the centre of the work is a high point of chaos in which the soloist’s material, interleaved with improvisation, is confronted by one of the movements of transmission for electric guitar and live electronics, itself partly improvisatory, in an extended passage whose (varied) repetition reveals the combination of pre-composed and spontaneously-performed elements. The solo part in this section is in fact itself derived from the guitar material. With this exception, and in distinction to most of the several compositions where I have expanded a solo into a “concertante” composition, all of the ensemble material is derived from the same underlying materials as the solo, in other words not creating a dialectical relationship between the two layers but one in which the ensemble generally takes one or more “alternative” pathways which that material “might” have taken, a feature which has its source once more in a contemplation of quantum-mechanical conundrums.
The Latin text of the vocal part is from Lucretius’ poem De rerum natura (“On the nature of things”), and describes the sudden and violent destruction of the world, though under what circumstances and for what reasons is unclear, since the crucial lines before the chosen fragment have been lost.
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbræ was begun in 1996 and completed in August 2001, during a DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm residency.
© Richard Barrett