op 89 - 5th string quartet Asasello Quartett Just for promotion. Please write me a direct message if you have complains about this upload concerning copyright issues. In that case, I will delete the video immediately.
Still can't make up my mind as to whether I prefer the French or Romanian spectral schools, but either way, I simply love the beautifully ethereal mysticism of Radulescu's work!!
It's tablature, like guitar tab but for violins, viola and cellos. For strings each, highest is 1st string, lowest is 4th or IVth. The numbers on top of each stave (15, 30. 45 etc) are seconds. The symbols explained in the beginning indicate certain very specific playing techniques.
Huge can of worms, and Radulescu is intentionally vague and leaves some things out of the performance notes. If you're still interested, William Dougherty had an paper published in Tempo called "On Horatiu Radulescu's Fifth String Quartet ('Before the Universe Was Born') Op. 89" where he briefly goes into the notation as well as the compositional theory.
+Kris Mariasy I think that just enjoying the melodic lines and rhythms of the individual instruments, and how they combine to form a total texture with its own personality, is all that is needed. For contemporary era string quartets or other small chamber ensembles, there's a greater emphasis on the totality of the sound, the totality of the texture, and differences in that texture, although in the most successful music (like Radulescu's here) each individual component still has an identity too.
so basically the harmonic series is the way of multiplying the frequency of note to create more notes that are increasingly higher and closer in pitch, and all the instruments are tuned down basically to different "ground" notes or fundamentals as they are called.
The Lao tzu quoations are used as rhythmic material, there's something on it in the beginning text. However the music quite deliberately abandons traditional notions of rhythm but not of a moving state in general. Radulescu used the analogy Sound Plasma, something that is constantly moving at seemingly random pace in a harmonically rich soundworld, where it has not become noise but hasn't become rhythm+melody or even pointillistic serialism either. The structure uses a lot of fibonacci/golden ratio ideas, there maybe a relation between these numbers and the pitch materials but I'm not sure. If you haven't listened to any of this before, it's not necessary to understand anything about how it is made. Just sit down relax, have some tea, turn it up notch and fall into it, allow your self to be immersed in the sound plasma. Without expecting tension or drama as in conventional musical structures it is nevertheless a very rewarding drama in this music, even though the listening is more open, distant, actually not over-analyzing. And if that doesn't tell you anything, see if you can find outdoor field recordings from Romania and it might give you some hint.
Thank you for your perspective. Can you point out to me specific instances where either Fibonacci numbers or Golden Ratio relationships are employed? I can't seem to find any myself.
well for instance page 13 starts with synchronicity, each page is like an icon, it's own one minute picture, although there is continuity there is also individuality of each page which is very much part of the musical structure. I think it has mostly to do with the overall time structure. Perhaps if you count the whole piece in minutes (29*60=1740) and divide that according to golden ratio or nested fibonacci numbers one might find something. For instance that seems to be a turnover between going from page 17 to 18 which is approximately where a calculate the golden mean. However, there are often great changes at the page turns so this might not say much but I would believe that there is something along those lines in there, I don't know exactly how or what and maybe not a lot of people do. He passed away before he could explain all of this, his language was very poetic and hard to penetrate the poetic nature of his speech. But we know for sure that both in terms of form and pitch material he was obsessed with numbers and their relationships.
