SKU: PE.EP72822

ISBN 9790577011769. 232 x 303mm inches. English.

I have only visited Damascus once, twenty years ago, on the way to Palmyra.  I had a purpose (I was writing music for a play about Palmyra’s Queen Zenobia) but essentially I was a tourist.  Like any visitor, I was thrilled to step out of the noisy modern city into the magical ancient world of the walled Old City, its vibrant souk leading to the magnificent mosque, and a labyrinth of winding, narrow streets filled with the smell of unleavened bread.

In Palmyra, I was met with extraordinary kindness everywhere.  On one occasion, a little Bedouin boy noticed that I was risking sunstroke wandering bare-headed among the spectacular ruins: he showed me how to tie a turban, then took me to have tea with his family in their tent.

Since then, I have watched helplessly as these places of wonder have been devastated and their inhabitants scattered and killed.  When the Sacconi Quartet suggested that I might choose a Syrian poet for our collaboration, I welcomed the idea.

I searched for a long time to find a contemporary poet whose work might gain from any music I could imagine.  I felt it was important to find first-hand accounts of the Syrian experience – but, of course, I was always reading them in translation.  In an anthology called Syria Speaks, I was astonished to read something that looked like prose, but was full of poetry.  It was Anne-Marie McManus’s fine translation of Ali Safar’s A Black Cloud in a Leaden White Sky – an eloquent, thoughtful, contained yet vivid account of life in a war-torn country, all the more moving for its restraint.

In setting these words, I have not attempted to imitate Syrian music.  However, there is what might be called a linguistic accommodation in my choice of scale, or mode.  Several movements are in a mode that I first discovered while writing a cantata commemorating the First World War: it has a tuning that I associate with war, its violence and desolation.  This eight-note mode is similar to scales found in Syrian music.  I did not choose it in the abstract: it emerged from the harmonies I was exploring in the earlier work, and emerged again as I was looking for the right musical colours to set Ali Safar’s words.  In this work, its Arabic aspect is more prominent. - Jonathan Dove

SKU: HL.14001122

ISBN 9788759855669. Danish.

ACTIONS, INTERPOLATIONS AND ANALYSES, symphonies for bass-clarinet and large ensemble (1987-90), is what is commonly termed a work in progress. So far Schaathun has completed three of five parts. The is the composer's first large-scale attempt to investigate possible connections between ostensibly unrelated material. Explained in simple terms, it involves taking two of Schaathun's own type of texture (composed by means of different techniques) and letting them rotate around a familiar musical object (in this case a short excerpt from Stravinskij's Symphonies of Wind instruments in which he employs the famous frozen chords). In the course of the piece the elements takes over various characteristics from one another and the form progresses from fairly clear-cut textures to a situation where the various textures are superimposed, creating a dramatic flow. On a more advanced level, the piece is about trying to mediate between different musical textures as metaphors for the different levels of the sound itself. One of the main questions in this context is; What is size in music? Is it possible to take a small chord(i.e. narrow register, few instruments, simple tone colours) and then blow it up (wide register, many instruments, advanced mixtures) in such a way that the listener still perceives it as the same chord? You have simply moved closer to the sound. At any rate, when Schaathun composed the piece, he himself travellig into the sound, as if were viewing a texture from a distance. He then recomposed the same situation and drew closer, and then recompose it a third time and simply get close enough to discover the world of sounds that thus emerged. A world of sounds capable of travelling at a tremendous speed... However, like all concertos, the piece is of course about the individual and his relationship to his surroundings (society). Schaathun has often pondered on the reason for this preoccupation wih solo concertos. The answer derives from his firm conviction that nothing would ever happen if it weren't for the initiative, the Action, of the individual.