Silent Flowers (1998) for string quartet
Composer: Toshio Hosokawa (細川俊夫) (b. 1955)
Performers: Arditti Quartet: Irvine Arditti & Ashot Sarkissjan, violin; Ralf Ehlers, viola; Lucas Fels, cello
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"In Silent Flowers (1998), the genesis and decay of sound are especially connected to reflections on Asian conceptions of time. This work, commissioned for the Donaueschingen Music Festival and premiered by the Arditti Quartet, takes its point of departure from the art of ikebana [flower arrangement] that Hosokawa learned from his family (his grandfather was an ikebana master) and the theories of ikebana he encountered in the writings of the Japanese philosopher Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990). "The flowers for ikebana are cut from living flowers. Death stands ready in the background. Because of this, the pricelessness of life seems more beautiful and more fragile. Life is not endless; it is fleeting and passes away, which is why it is so beautiful. Such thoughts relating to time are prevalent in all the traditional arts of Japan [...]. The formation of sound cannot create eternity, because by virtue of its origin out of silence, sound must return into the silence from which it came." In the first section of Silent Flowers, silence takes on a theatrical form: the individual fields of sound disappear after only a few measures into a series of silences, with the instruction to "freeze!". Here the musicians stop playing abruptly and remain in a motionless state; the physical aspect of the playing is frozen. The vertical accents, experimented with previously in Landscape I, are here taken to the extreme. Already at the beginning, hard, percussive slashes of sound (sforzato, often marked as Bartok pizzicatos) appear out of nothing, or they cut off crescendos of sounds. Here again the sound gestures seem derived from calligraphic gestures, where the movement of the brush - which initially does not touch the canvas - finds an equivalent in silence or extremely soft sounds: The master chooses a point in the air (called konton kaiki), moves the brush from this point, touches the paper, and then returns to the same point in the air. Traces of the linear movement can be seen on the paper - they are the visible part of the motion, just as important as the invisible part. I have interpreted this in my music as sound and silence." But aspects of noh theater have also inspired Hosokawa's Silent Flowers, because the blossom (hana in Japanese) is in noh the symbol of an achieved artistic representation. "Like a flower that blooms in darkness, like the beautiful form of a noh actor, who opens himself in a performance - I wanted to compose such a flower in sound, which would blossom out of silence." This piece in three parts (as often with Hosokawa) follows a principle of gradually increasing intensity, in which the sound processes constantly return to silence in order to develop an even greater intensity on their next appearance. Individual passages can take on a merciless expressivity when sounds are produced at the bridge, bowed with great pressure. The ubiquitous presence of noise elements in the sound is an essential aspect of Hosokawa's musical language and can be traced back to the practices of articulation in Japanese and Korean court music, to sound techniques of the western avant-garde, and to acoustical impressions from nature - a trio of references with substantial significance for the character of Hosokawa's music."
~Dirk Wieschollek (translated by John Patrick Thomas and W. Richard Rieves)
Source: CD booklet
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16 сен 2022
