Funeral chant
Music reduced to austere essentials
Scores & Recordings
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Recording
Summary
Funeral chant is an austere clarinet trio built from tightly disciplined means and a persistent return to a single generative idea. Its four sections trace, in symbolic form, birth, youth, maturity, and death, turning the Romanian notion of ‘song of passing over’ into a concise meditation on human becoming and departure.
Imprint
| Orchestration | clarinet trio |
|---|---|
| Lyrics | — |
| Duration | 4:30′ |
| State | Finished |
| Completed | 2013 |
| Premiered | — |
| Performed by | — |
| Honors | — |
| Copyright | Claudius Iacob |
Program notes
I recently completed, on June 30, 2013, a new piece, Funeral chant, for a trio of B-flat clarinets, a piece I now finally have the chance to publish. It was occasioned by a sad event on which, however, I will not dwell.
I conceived Funeral chant as an exercise in clarity and self-discipline. The musical discourse is stripped of all superfluous elements; the music lives by its own austerity and by its obstinate return to the generative element.
The four sections recover, on a symbolic plane, four ontological stages: birth, as arrival, outlined monodically through the insinuation of the unique thematic material; youth, as play, stylized as a dance idea in which the three instruments pair off in apparently random ways; maturity, as reflection, capable of decanting and sedimenting values, rendered musically as an isomorphic chorale; and finally death, as departure, recounted through a recollection of the initial sonic material, clothed in fragments of all the musical syntaxes with which it has flirted along the way.