- Title: SONGLESSNESS
- Instrumentation: saxophone quartet and organ
- Year: 2021
- Duration: 70′
- Commissioner: Amstel Quartet with the financial support of Fonds Podiumkunsten
- Premiere: 5th February 2022 Orgelpark, Amsterdam
- First performer: Una Cintina (organ) & Amstel Quartet
- Remarks: dedicated to Amstel Quartet
- Buy Score: Donemus Publishi
PROGRAM NOTE
SONGLESSNESS is a monument to that which cannot exist yet is experienced internally.
SONGLESSNESS is a journey towards infinite melody and the expansion of ‘time-space’.
Time is one of man’s most mysterious enigmas. The problem of time has attracted and continues to attract philosophers seeking to understand the nature of our existence. It worries humanity because it directly affects everyone who feels the inevitability and relentlessness of time. Music is the art form most closely associated with time, because its essence is movement. Perhaps this is why music has always been regarded as a repository of esoteric knowledge, holding the secret to humanity’s most pressing mystery.
Music has always been able to reproduce time in several dimensions simultaneously. This phenomenon was vividly expressed in the music of Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler. Listeners were able to experience entirely different dimensions of time through the endless continuity of the entire musical texture, including harmony, achieved also through the use of interrupted cadences and interrupted harmonic phrases. The music of these composers is difficult to grasp at a single glance, the flow of the music seems to flow over the edge, not staying within the boundaries of the listener’s usual perception.
After that, interest waned. It was only in the post-war period that Schnittke, Ligeti and Zimmermann returned to the study of this aspect of music.
We can say with certainty that the key here is the composer’s relationship to melody and harmony. Each of the above composers explores these possibilities in a different way, with sometimes astonishing results. We can also see the composer’s attempts to restore melody to its status as the primary means of expression in music. Who would have thought that we would have to fight for this in the XXI century?
We can see that it is quite successful with composers within a single tonality or modal system (Pärt, Kancheli, Lang). A more refined method is explored by composers who use melody in combination with modulations and extended tonality (Szymański, Lunyov, Silvestrov). In the case of these examples, we see that composers use melody as a kind of allusion to melodies of the past, as if distorting them in a crooked mirror.
For centuries, composers have tried in various ways to prolong the existence of the melody, since it is the most magical moment in the musical texture. What about the interrupted passages in Chopin’s music? Or Beethoven’s and Wagner’s use of the double dominant, and so on. Here we are confronted with basic but important questions: what gives the sense of the end of a melody? What gives life to a melody? Can a melody exist forever? What is a short melody and what is a long melody? How do we perceive one or the other? Can we trick people’s minds into believing something that doesn’t exist?
SONGLESSNESS focuses on a combination of Wagner’s idea of an endless melody and the creation of a poly-temporal development of the material.
Over the years, Shalygin has been drawn to a curious paradox: The slowness of musical development does not always work as a slow time effect. This paradox poses the following questions for the composer:
How can one speed up the movement so that time is perceived extremely slowly, and how can one slow down the tempo so that the perception of time is accelerated?
It is these borderline moments that are being explored in SONGLESSNESS.