TORU TAKEMITSU: “Rain Tree” (1981)
“It is called the ‘Rain Tree’ because it seems to make it rain. Whenever it rains at night, throughout the following morning the tree makes drops fall from all its richly growing leaves. While the other trees quickly dry out after the rain, the Rain Tree, because its leaves, no bigger than fingertips grow so closely together, can store up raindrops in its leaves. Truly an ingenious tree!”
—Quoted from “Atama no ii Ame no Ki” (The Ingenious Rain Tree) by Kenzaburo Oé
TANIA LEÓN: Rítmicas (2019)
This five-movement work is based on a rhythmic spectrum that creates a rainbow of polyrhythmic inventions emerging from the Son and Guaguancó clave––a key pattern used as a tool for temporal organization and as a ground or rhythmical motive, and which is at the basis of each movement.
The clave pattern is a fundamental African-derived rhythmic device which consists of the addition of irregular pulses repeated as a persistent structure––ostinato––throughout a piece.
This rhythmical tool creates and instills music with a sense of energetic groove and can be found in the music of Cuba, Puerto Rico, throughout the rest of the Caribbean basin, in Brazil, in Latin America and in sub-Saharan cultures.
Rítmicas was inspired by the legacy and the title of a work by Cuban composer, violinist, and conductor Amadeo Roldán, who in 1930 wrote the first symphonic pieces to incorporate Afro-Cuban percussion instruments.
The fifth and sixth of Roldán’s Rítmicas, composed around the same time as Edgard Varès’s Ionisation (1929–1931), were among the first works in the Western classical music tradition scores solely for the newly conceived percussion ensemble, an ensemble comprised exclusively of all types of percussion instruments.
—Tania León, composer
GÉRARD GRISEY: Les espaces acoustiques (1975)
Gerard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques is one of the seminal works of the spectral music school. In an interview with Guy Lelong, Grisey said:
Everything began with Périodes. From a formal point of view, this piece consists of a succession of episodes, in the last of which I experimented for the first time with a technique that seemed to me in need of development. I had analyzed, with the help of a spectrogram, the sound of the trombone’s E and created its main components (the fundamental and its harmonics) with the instruments of Périodes. That opened my eyes to a new way of harmonic thinking and which I later called “instrumental synthesis.” I then had to write a sequel, and this turned out to be Partiels for 18 musicians (1975), which includes the instruments of Périodes. Then I finally decided to compose a whole cycle that would begin with a piece for solo instrument and finish with a large orchestra. As the viola played a prominent role in Périodes, the solo piece had to be written for this instrument, and it was Prologue for solo viola.
There are three kinds of moments in Périodes, analogous to human breathing: states of inhaling, exhaling and resting are translated aurally into moments of dynamic and growing tension, dynamic and progressive relaxation, and static periodicity. The periodicity of the piece creates a distinct weight, as it turns in on itself in repetitive circles, until a new germ surfaces and spurs on a new energy and the evolution of a new thread. The cyclic nature of Périodes is not meant to affect synthetic accuracy. Instead, the cycles are more organic, or “blurred” like our own heartbeats, like our own walking paces, rhythmic but with a degree of human fluctuation.
—Walter Boudreau, artistic director, Société de musique contemporaine du Québec
