Forest in My Dreams

The extra-musical impulse behind this piece, heterogeneous in construction and shifting in expression, came from the neo-expressionist verses of the poet Vlad Dobrescu, especially his poems Prologue and The Forest.

Set within the strangeness of a universe recalling the alienating tales of Hermann Hesse, many of them ending in suicide, these two texts, though they found no literal inclusion in the present musical work — since the piece is not a lied — provided its atmosphere and shaped, more or less roughly, the rudiment of musical dramaturgy that binds it together.

The first text, Prologue, under the pretext of sketching a hunting story unfolding on a morning full of mist and snowfall, explores the inward terrors of one of its characters. By the end of the poem, the deft handling of metaphor plants in the reader the thought that the two men are not in fact going hunting and that, most likely, only one will return. In the second poem, The Forest, the contemplative plane subtly migrates toward a surrealist one, the character’s fascination with an ancient forest literally petrifying him and, in the end, transforming him into a tree.

In light of the above, Forest in My Dreams is an atmospheric piece, with narrative intrusions limited in scope and amplitude and clearly demarcated. From a compositional point of view, it is an intensely harmonic work, built around a pan- and polytonal vein, with occasional and discreet moments of free atonalism. Rooted in the “melody of tone-colors” of the Second Viennese School, in fact with clear similarities to the third of Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, by Arnold Schoenberg, often titled Farben, "Colors", the present music produces, improbably enough, dissonance through the amalgamation of consonances: a number of harmonic entities, each consonant in itself, overlap while constantly changing in salience and instrumental color. The result is a sonority in perpetual transformation, the intention being to obtain a rainbow in continuous motion, a constant chromatic metamorphosis, a mixture of sounds equally undefinedly consonant and undefinedly dissonant.

In the service of this aim, the orchestration is more symphonic than chamber-like. The instruments do not pursue self-affirmation; there are no virtuoso passages designed to display them as distinct entities. Rather, they all function as a single multi-timbral instrument.

The melodic dimension of the piece, insofar as one may speak of melody at all — since the piece is more atmospheric than narrative — draws on two very distinct and immediately recognizable sources for a listener educated in Western art music: Olivier Messiaen’s ornithological fascination and the Baroque doctrine of the affections. The former, with its strongly pictorial, descriptive, and non-evolutionary character, serves exclusively to evoke, alongside the diffuse harmonies, the vaguely defined forest setting in which the rudimentary action of the two poems takes place. The latter, with a declared narrative and dramaturgical purpose, offers an expression of extreme austerity, scholastic and stripped of all ornamental burden, an austerity matched only by its firm and unequivocal rhetoric, visible in intervallic choices, overt phrasing, narrow ambitus, and discreet references to the world of Gregorian chant.

Although it adheres to no established formal scheme, the music reveals its mode of organization from the first hearing: a nucleus, a hard core, consisting of a narrative discourse of undeniable vocality and relative harmonic stability, is sporadically pierced by a limited number of recognizable descriptive structures, each evolving almost imperceptibly along its own path toward musical fulfillment.

Out of this struggle for supremacy between the various planes emerges the image of a fragmented yet intelligible becoming, of a music that, like the poetic text that provoked it, oscillates between the hypnotic and the oneiric, between contemplation and anguish, continuously interweaving narration and reverie.