Seven Haikus on Bird Prints

Seven Haikus on Bird Prints is an eight-minute electronic poem made up of seven distinct episodes which nevertheless share recurring themes and sonorities and collaborate in the construction and becoming of an organic, unified musical entity.

Apart from duration and subtitle, any other resemblance to Edgard Varese’s 1958 composition is rather forced, since the sonic substance of the present work does not include concrete sounds in its expressive arsenal. More than that, far from revolting in any way against the natural and the traditional, and thus seeking to create an artificial meta-musical language based on promoting crude sonic expressions and acoustic artifacts as elements of artistic vocabulary, my piece attempts to recover both. More precisely, although it is a work of cultivated electronic music, Seven Haikus... departs from convention and does not dismiss wholesale the sonorities, processes and working tools of classical musical composition. On the one hand, it blends the novel, artificial sound envelope produced electronically with the concepts, procedures, and vocabulary of traditional composition, thesis, antithesis, development, reduction, reiteration and reprise, imitation, contrast, musical syntax, chordal structure, melodic succession, and so forth. On the other hand, it restores to cultivated electronic music a number of elements too easily dismissed and too readily treated as the preserve of pop production, such as rhythmic pulse, consonance, tonal-modal pitch organization, thematic statement and development, and the like.

Consequently, despite the fact that the virtual instruments used do obscure, through their continuously transforming and transfiguring sound envelopes, the clear perception of pitch and rhythmic succession, we may still speak in this electronic poem of musical syntax, just as we may speak of harmonic structures and of thematism. Thus the music makes predominant use of heterophonies, specifically the species with pedal or ison, interrupted by clearly delimited inserts of polyphony, especially in the odd-numbered episodes; the homophonic chorale, in its most explicit form, appears ostentatiously three times in the even-numbered haikus; monodic fragments can be found in the first and last episode, while the penultimate one offers a glimpse of accompanied monody.

Formally, the piece materializes as seven self-standing episodes, approximately one minute each, with the exception of the last. Each episode, or musical haiku, has, like its literary model, a binary structure that in my composition usually gravitates around the binomial light-darkness. As in haiku, the cut occurs at approximately the positive golden ratio point of each episode, and the concrete musical expression of this binary opposition assumes various forms, from the classical pairs consonance-dissonance and low register-high register to much subtler sonic suggestions that would not have been possible in the purely acoustic universe of traditional instruments.

On the semantic plane, each of the work’s seven sections seeks to transpose into music, as faithfully as possible, a series of traits proper to the literary haiku genre.

Last but not least, haiku poetry has a subtext: it possesses the ability to provoke the reader into meditating on subjects of a metaphysical order that the text itself does not seem to address. The Seven Haikus on Bird Prints likewise have a subtext, both each individually and the cycle as a whole. This becomes progressively clearer as the piece unfolds its content, culminating with the ineluctably celestial chorale of the penultimate episode and with the fragments of Byzantine monody interwoven with the polyphonic material of the last. Like Matsuo Basho’s poems, my musical haikus use the contemplation of creation as an occasion for a higher contemplation, that of the Creator who brought it into existence. The echoes of an Orthodox Vespers service that emerge from the final haiku of the cycle underscore the thesis I have articulated, artistically, in all my compositions of the last decade: that we will not be able to preserve our cultural identity as a people unless we remain in close contact with the Christian spirituality that formed and shaped us.