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Georges Aperghis: Avis de tempête (2004)

From the album  Avis de tempête

Avis de tempête (Storm Warning) is an early 21st-century opera by Greek-French composer Georges Aperghis. The first of the opera’s 13 tableaux, presented here, seems to begin in medias res, with a kaleidoscopic array of electronic whooshes, distorted guitar noodling, jagged woodwind fragments, and schizoid vocal interjections. The middle portion is dominated by a throbbing electronic soundfield, a kind of radio static through which shimmer enigmatic and fragmentary transmissions from another plane.  As the fiercely spinning centrifugal force set in motion by the opening section begins to dissipate, the piece winds down with a duet between a dolefully descending Shepard tone and a disturbed female voice reciting a bizarre macaronic text.

The libretto, written by Aperghis and Peter Szendy, is a patchwork text that includes fragments from Melville, Kafka, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, and Hugo. Another collaborator, Sebastien Roux, is credited with “computer sound design,” including an implementation of granular synthesis conceptually inspired by William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique.  Burroughs’ influence is also at work in Roux’s effort to musically realize the concept of virus through the use of digital clicks and glitches (with a tip of the hat to Yasunao Tone).

Fluids, sounds, images, information: they all pass through us and it becomes very difficult to focus on any one thing.  Electronics enable me to realize this state of perpetual transition, to jump from one world to another.  An abstract sound becomes the voice of an actor, a phoneme becomes running water, a character may be divided up and then reconstructed elsewhere.  (Georges Aperghis)

February 20, 2010, 4:43pm

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Karl-Birger Blomdahl: “Mima-tape 1”

From the opera Aniara (1959)

I’m still reeling a bit from my recent discovery of the world’s first space-opera, written by Swedish composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl in the late 50s and premiered in 1959.  It is based on the “epic science fiction poem” Aniara by the Nobel Prize winner Harry Martinson.

“Earth, become unclean / with toxic radiation, is accorded / a time of calm, repose and quarantine”: A group of refugees abandons the threatened planet and boards the spaceship Aniara, “and like a giant pupa without weight, / vibrationless, Aniara gyrates clear / and free of interference out from Earth.”  But a near-collision with an asteroid throws the ship off course, and its denizens confront an endless voyage into uncharted space.  They are saved from total despair by the Mima, a quasi-sentient computer worshiped by the passengers of Aniara for its ability to project “images / and tongues and scents from undiscovered countries.”  Soon the voyagers receive the news of the annihilation of “Dorisvale” (Earth); Mima, who had “beheld the granite’s white-hot weeping / when stone and ore were vaporized to mist,” could not bear the trauma of witnessing the Earth’s demise, and self-destructs.  All this in the first 30 pages!

The musical idiom generally resembles the “international style” of postwar modernism: Blomdahl based the composition of the opera on an “all-interval” twelve-tone row.  But there is a refreshing variety to the music, as represented by jazzy-dissonant dance-hall pieces and solemn choral movements.  In its stylistic diversity, Aniara anticipates the much better-known modernist opera Die Soldaten, composed around the same time, but not premiered until 1965.

For the scenes depicting the Mima, Blomdahl composed three electronic pieces he called “Mima-tape.”  These are among the first electronic works created in Sweden, and, with the exception of Jörg Mager’s creation of synthetic bell sounds for a 1931 production of Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, perhaps the first use of electronic sounds in the history of opera.

The form of “Mima-tape 1” is loose and episodic.  A series of short sound-vignettes evokes the phantasmagoric projections of the Mima, which culminate with the live broadcast of Earth’s destruction.

The following fragments can perhaps be distinguished in this ‘sound-play,’ based on certain keywords, lines or moods in Harry Martinson’s epic: The song of the light years and cosmos—the key to the mystery seen as through walls of mountainous-deep space crystal… Evil reports penetrate space, the storm of dark rays from distant voids… Glimpses of the true light of solace.  Veils of dreams… Death plays chess with infinity… Fire and death ravage the Earth.

October 11, 2009, 4:25pm

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Bernd Alois Zimmermann: “Preludio”

From the opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers, 1965)

The German Bernd Alois Zimmermann is one of the most underappreciated composers among the so-called “post-war avant-garde” in Europe.  In the 1950s and 60s he developed a highly idiosyncratic compositional style that synthesized rigorous serial technique with quotations from jazz, classical, and popular music.

Zimmermann began work on his magnum opus, the opera Die Soldaten, in 1957; after being labelled “unperformable” due to its incredible musical and dramaturgical complexity, it was finally premiered in 1965 after undergoing numerous revisions.  Inspired by St. Augustine’s philosophy of time, Zimmermann conceived of a scenario in which action takes place simultaneously on three different stages.  The score also calls for multiple loudspeakers and film projectors, making productions of the work exceedingly rare.

Essentially an overture to the opera, the “Preludio,” with its cacophonous brass swells and insistant, minatory (and unnervingly irregular) tympani pulse, powerfully condenses the nightmarish violence of the plot.

June 12, 2009, 4:30pm