a new historicism
Whoever seeks to form an impression of historical time in everyday life may notice the wrinkles of an old man or the scars in which a former fate is preserved. The conjunction of ruins and rebuilt sites can be recalled, noting the obvious shift in style that lends architectural outlines their deep temporal dimension; or on might contemplate the coexistence, connectedness, and hierarchy of variously modernized forms of transport, through which, from sleigh to airplane, entire eras meet. Above all, an individual can think of the successive generations in family or in working life, where different spaces of experience overlap and perspective of the future intersect, inclusive of all the conflict with they are invested. Even such preliminary observations make clear that the generality of a measurable time based on Nature– even if it possesses its own history– cannot be transformed unmediated into a historical concept of time.
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical time
Reinhart Koselleck
In our fragmented Now, we need new ways to consider the influence of the past in our notions of the present. Kosselleck describes the mood more elegantly than most, but echoes pervade, in our mixed stances from revolution to revanchism to polysemic irony.
In Quintet l'homme armé, medieval history is obscurely traced in the instantiated work and permeates through the process of its creation. In La Deploration, one finds a most devout form of memorialization of works, offering of thanks to teachers recently and anciently passed. In Etude on ‘Pymalion’, a ballade of the Turino Codex is transformed much as the subjecot of its text. Floruit Egregiis is a furious exultation of success in a battle for the continuation of life.
In addition to the examples below additional audio and video instances of this tendency may be found HERE and HERE.
Quintet l’homme armé
Quintet l’homme armé opens the album with a shriek. Surprisingly, given its titular invocation of medieval aesthetics, this dissonance continues as the once pervasive 15th-century melody is subjected to a series of transformations so drastic it is rendered largely unrecognizable. Historical, contrapuntal, and isorhythmic techniques are effaced by strategies linked to more recently ascended masters, like Ligeti and Lutoslawski.
Etude on ‘Pymalion’
This etude is a study of the ballade, 'Pymalion qui moult subtilz estoit,' found in the Torino Codex, a compendium of music from 15th century Cyprus.
The source piece serves as the origin for pitch and rhythmic material, but also in that it is a study in the project of adoption, in the thorough engagement with the exquisite foreignness of the past, transformed into the colors of modern instrumental techniques and rhythmic play.
Floruit Egregiis (2011) is dedicated to M. Jennifer Bloxam, a noted scholar of the Franco-Flemish liturgical music with whom I studied at Williams. While I was studying with her, Jennifer published her seminal study “In Praise of Spurious Saints: The Missae Floruit egregiis by Pipelare and La Rue,” an essay from which I borrow liberally in this note and this work. My piece shares its topoi with her essay, the interrelated masses 'Missa de Sancto Livino' of M. Pipelare and 'Missa de Sancto Job' of Pierre de la Rue.