Deafs’ Music

Deafs’ Music owes its existence, and its strange title, to an experiment, an experiment for me, though standard practice for many composers: I set out to compose music without access to a musical instrument, and I did so in the most rigorous way I could.

For those few fortunate people able to hear a score flawlessly in all its complexity merely by looking at the notes, such an undertaking holds few revelations. For me, however, those few afternoons of writing music in a Bucharest park were full of discoveries.

Deprived of empirical contact with pitch, and separated from the most competent judge of music, namely hearing, I was forced to give capital attention to those meta-musical elements whose good management usually facilitates the perception of a work as music proper: form, the architectural construction of the piece; tectonics, the alternation, rhythm, and relations between the valleys and peaks of a melody; syntax, the expression of music as monody, homophony, or polyphony; and the evolution of dynamics, tempo, and harmonic tensions, where, in the absence of a piano, Hindemith’s theoretical hierarchy proved especially helpful. I was also compelled to view in a new light the thorny issue of developing musical material, being forced to rely on mechanical procedures that could be operated and controlled exclusively visually: augmentations and diminutions of intervals and durations, additions, elisions, transpositions, and above all repetitions.

This last procedure in particular lies at the foundation of the first piece. Labyrinth is a tangled skein of motives that establishes its salience and its relations of antecedent and consequent almost exclusively through repetition. Its humorous bent is ensured by the elaborate system of nested repeat bars, a guarantee of many radically different performances of the same music.

Stops is a music austere in thematic material, yet one that becomes plausible thanks to its rapid tempo, and the implicit stream of sound it generates, together with a radical contrast of states produced by the many fermatas, marked very explicitly and audibly.

Chorale is exactly what its title declares it to be, with a tripartite harmonic discourse and a middle section that offers certain rudiments of polyphony. The music justifies itself through an overt harmonic rhythm, a very clearly articulated form, and an uncompromising raw austerity, consistently exposed without indulgence.