The Fall

This composition, The Fall, bearing the somewhat odd subtitle A Short Musical Novel for Strings Orchestra, is a study for chamber string orchestra, twenty-five players. Based on a literary text of my own[1], poetic in essence though without versification, The Fall revives, for the sake of exercise and experiment, a musical type that has all but vanished today: program music.

The score is built on an antinomic principle of composition, applied on as many parametric levels as possible. The binary oppositions that arise in this way, long-short, loud-soft, high-low, consonant-dissonant, agitated-still, organized-chaotic, rhythmic-atemporal, coherent-loose, and so on, catalyze and sustain the musical dramaturgy, which otherwise follows, with a touching naivety, deliberate and sought after, the assumed literary program.

From this point of view, the formal organization of the piece is fairly easy to follow, since it can be segmented quite efficiently on the basis of the plastic and kinetic landmarks abundantly provided by the extra-musical source. The sections marked in the score, whose justification is purely pragmatic, they exist only to ease rehearsals, will serve us as guideposts.

Harmony is, in varying proportions, omnipresent in the substratum of this music, predominantly in the form of pedalized polychords that constantly change color through the selective dynamic variation of their component tones. The procedure, very common in spectral music, is probably a radicalization of Messiaen’s technique of added-note chords. In the present case, one should speak rather of resonance tones. Onto a basic structure of two or three superposed triads are grafted two or three tones chosen in such a way that each of them is more consonant with one and only one of those triads, while having varying degrees of dissonance with the others. Through very carefully controlled dynamic variation, both of the basic tones as a group and of the resonance tones individually, one obtains ever new shades, weights and harmonic fundamentals. The general harmonic climate is pan-chromatic in the first two thirds of the piece, so as to give equal chances to all the micro-melodies from which the textures are composed, and it grows more nuanced toward the end, ultimately tending toward spectral harmonies.

With the exception of the final section, the entire melodic material, sinuous and organized in principle around an ever-present formula of inverted chromaticism, is emphatically non-thematic and non-tonal without thereby becoming unintelligible. A certain degree of musical meaning breathes through every melodic intervention thanks to meticulous phrasing. To this is added a carefully built dynamic profile that faithfully follows the intrinsic semantics of the pitch contour, nuances generally intensifying as the melody rises, and vice versa.

With the exception of the final sections, the temporal plane of this music borders on arrhythmia. This is sought after, in keeping with the literary substratum, and is obtained on the one hand by over-saturating the discourse with hemiolas and on the other by perpetual rhythmic invention, simultaneous attack being practically nonexistent. The absence of local, micro-granular rhythm is however compensated by a macro-rhythm, or global rhythm, a broader respiration of the piece, created by the succession and alternation of different textures and characters, and this provides the musical dramaturgy with the reference system it needs in order to function.

I believe one may speak of orchestration even in the case of a homogeneous orchestra such as this one. As far as I am concerned, I treated each of the twenty-five string instruments at my disposal as a multi-timbral source of sound, something entirely justifiable if one considers the virtually endless wealth of colors and attack types that a bowed string instrument can produce. Concretely, I applied techniques of synthesis, or sonic agglutination, more typical of electronic music, constructing new timbres by adding resonance tones, see above, at much lower dynamic intensities, which the ear will perceive as harmonic or inharmonic partials depending on their constantly shifting relation to the basic tones. I also applied classical orchestration techniques, for instance by using doublings or by superimposing, on the same pitch, various bowing techniques and attack modes: arco, pizzicato, including Bartok pizzicato and pizzicato with the fingernail, tremolo, sul ponticello, sul tasto, vibrato, non-vibrato, and so on. All these means, together with the harmonic techniques described above, resulted in a greatly enriched palette of colors, capable of serving the proposed programmatic source faithfully, promptly and efficiently.

Despite the exercise of poetic and literary imagination that lies at the basis of the piece, its trigger was entirely concrete. Toward the end of January 2019, not in November, as in the short prose, Bucharest witnessed a very rare and spectacular, and no less catastrophic, meteorological phenomenon. The freezing rain that fell between 24 and 29 January, made up in fact not of ice but of supercooled water that froze instantly on contact with surfaces already cold from the ground, encased everything within a few days in a sheet of ice up to one centimeter thick. That image, wholly otherworldly, haunted me for a long time, yet for various reasons I needed several years to decant it and arrive at a literary and musical formulation that felt plausible, coherent and refined.

[1] The text, in English, is included at the beginning of the score.