O. Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time
Quartet for the End of Time is an extraordinary work by French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992). In 1940, Messiaen was captured by the German army and detained in a prison camp in Görlitz, where he met three captive musicians: clarinettist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire, and cellist Étienne Pasquier. It was for these fellow prisoners and himself that Messiaen composed this eight-movement quartet for the clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. The four musicians first performed it in the prison camp on 15 of January 1941.
This piece draws inspiration and takes its title from the Bible Revelation 10: “Then the angel I saw standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to heaven and swore by the one who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them, and said ‘there shall be no more delay’”. The first movement portrays birds as they awake in the early morning. The clarinet and the violin represent the warbles of blackbirds and nightingales respectively, whereas the cello and the piano convey the harmonious calmness of the heaven with ostinatos. In the second movement, the spectacle of the angel revealing himself and his strong power are represented at the beginning and end, with the unreachable sound of heaven in the middle section. In the third movement rendered by the clarinet solo, the “abyss” in the movement’s title is, in the composer’s own words, “time, with its sadness and tedium. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs”. The fourth movement is a scherzo performed by the violin, cello and clarinet, and clearly has a different personality from the other movements. The fifth movement is a duet for the cello and the piano, in which the broad phrase “infinitely slow” on the cello highlights, with love and reverence, the eternity of Jesus, “whose time never runs out”. The sixth movement has the most distinctive rhythms, with the four instruments jointly representing the horrible scene of the final judgement: six angels sound the trumpets as a sign of imminent disaster and the trumpet of the seventh angel declares that God’s mystery has been successfully accomplished. Echoing the second movement, the seventh once again conveys the spectacle of the angel’s powerful appearance, especially the rainbow lingering above his head, symbolising peace and wisdom. The eighth movement is a duet for the violin and the piano, where the long violin solo echoes the cello solo in the fifth movement. If the fifth movement celebrates Jesus as the “word of God”, the finale eulogizes Jesus as a “human being”.
La Monte Young: Composition 1960 #7
Minimalism emerged in the United States in the 1960s featuring frequent repetitions through the use of the simplest possible material and technique. As one of the earliest icons of minimal music, La Monte Young (born in 1935) is an unconventional composer strongly influenced by John Cage (1912-1992), a prominent aleatoric music creator. Aleatoric music refers to a genre where the composer purposefully relinquishes control over certain primary elements of a composition and leaves them to pure chance, an objective determination in order to render a certain level of uncertainty in the music. Such was the case of 4’33”, Cage’s most classic aleatoric piece. Following his idol’s footsteps, Young created the very experimental series Compositions 1960 with some of the pieces clearly speaking of performance art. He marked “Build a fire in front of the audience” for Composition 1960 #2 and “Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area” for #5. The #7 featured in this concert is the most played of the series. Its entire score is simply a perfect 5th comprising both a B and an F# note so the performer is instructed to hold the interval for a long time. However, the composer did not specify the instrument to be used or the interval duration, which means that the performance of Composition 1960 #7 involves great unknowns and openness. It is worth anticipating how this work will be presented in this concert.
L. Andriessen: Workers Union
Dutch composer Louis Andriessen (1939-2021) wrote Workers Union in 1975 for the Dutch orchestra De Volharding (Perseverance), where he was working as a pianist. In certain ways, this piece is very similar to Young’s Composition 1960 #7: uncertain instrumentation, “for any loud sounding group of instruments”; and uncertain duration, as the composer instructed that “any performance should last at least 15-20 minutes”. These similarities are counterposed with divergencies too, as Young’s score has a fixed pitch but no specific rhythm, whereas Workers Union features a rigid rhythm but without a determined pitch. The one line in the score represents the middle register of the performers’ instruments, and the notes simply suggest that the sounds should be rendered higher or lower than this middle register, yet “no scale or traditional figuration should be played”. The entire piece comprises a series of fragments with such instructions and there is not a fixed number of repetitions for each fragment. In Andriessen’s words, “This piece is a combination of individual freedom and severe discipline”. “Only in the case of every player playing with such an intention that their part is an essential one, the work will succeed; just as in the political work”.
By Danni Liu
Translated from Chinese