Survival Exercices

The first version of Survival Exercises (2013), never published and never presented to the public, was born out of great frustration, in a period when the cruel vanity of an existence apparently prosperous yet in fact devoid of purpose had brought my creative self to the brink of extinction. In an effort to escape the united assault of Gantt charts, spreadsheets, reports, estimates, and various other trivialities, I cobbled these Exercises together in order to prove to myself that I am more than a tiny cog spinning endlessly inside an infernal machine; a conscious attempt to remember myself as a creator. In the midst of that process I underwent a revelation that ended by lifting from my eyes the veil through which I had been looking around: I saw humanity entire, wandering in exhaustion through an existence drained of spirit, love, hope and faith. That transformed my Exercises from a merely personal rescue operation into an undefined cry against a world that, even as it advances technologically, decays spiritually.

In their current form, Survival Exercises retain, in principle, the content of Book Two from the much longer earlier version, while occasionally drawing from Book One in the newly added electronic medium. The piece enters irreverently a territory now dominated by strange dissonances, proposing a music shockingly rudimentary, simple and undisguised, pleasures from which some listeners may shy away. And yet these modest studies for solo bassoon, for that is what they are, seek to make today’s classical listener rediscover the joy of perceiving an agreeable harmony, an eloquent discourse, an honest musical theme, one you might hum on your way back from the concert.

The subtitle of the piece, Meditations for Solo Bassoon, reveals the author’s intention to glean and set to music several profoundly human themes for meditation:

I. On Death, and its lucrative remembering
An ascending gesture, like the search for a sonic foundation on which something may be built. Also a subtle reference to the teachings of the "improved fathers" in the deserts of the East, who regarded the constant remembrance of death as the cornerstone of spiritual correction.

II. On Life, and its ruthless waltz
A dark rudiment of a waltz, built on the groundwork laid in the preceding section. It manages, in some measure, to render the paradoxical nature of human life, which does nothing but perpetuate an unbroken state of mortality.

III. On Marriage, and the way she leaves me silent
Something like an interlude; a sarcastic plunge into the worldly core of our everyday existence.

IV. On Love, Youth, Shady Benches, and that old barrel organ man
The love story of a cheap novel, an adorably outdated romance, frenetically supported by the underlying musique concrete. It sends the listener into the time or place of fabulous youth-without-old-age, a realm in which one may still fall in love with life and with everyone else like a high-school student.

V. Epilogue, on the much too distant sunset vespers
A sad and pensive remembrance of the "imperishable soul", of the days when inert matter had not yet swallowed it whole. A recollection of the times when people still believed in God. Not accidentally, the accompanying electronic medium brings echoes of an old Christian chant, reiterating the author’s conviction that the only remedy for the inner void consuming us today is to recover our spiritual roots.

The electronic medium provided by this new version alternates passages of pure electronic music with passages of musique concrete, at times amalgamating so-called virtual instruments as well. All of them stand in close relation to the meditation they accompany, and either challenge or support the bassoonist’s interpretive undertaking.