6. Schlagzeug (Mis3rere)

It was listening again to the music of Josquin Desprez and reading analytical texts on his music, and while discovering its astonishing high level of (pre-serial) structuring together with its strong expressiveness, that I had the idea to paraphrase his superb Miserere mei, deus, writing this piece. It was neither the first time that I make references in my work to ancient complex music, nor the first time that I pay homage to Josquin: my Contrafacta (2013), for brass quintet and live-electronics, was already a radical metamorphosis based on excerpts of his Mille regretz. In the case of Mis3rere, the purpose was also to conceive a kind of speechless Lamento: in 2017 the Russian October Revolution becomes 100 years old, but despite this we live nowadays in its counterpart, in the decrepitude of a hegemonic decadent capitalism, and even with the risk of emergence of new fascistic trends. During the conception of this work, I discovered another terrific piece by Josquin: Cueurs desolez par toute nation (in modern French: Cœurs désolés de toutes nations, thus Suffered hearts of all nations), which seemed to me as an announcement in advance of the end of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifest: “Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch!”Asked for a commission for a fantastic ensemble based in New York, I wished to write a purely instrumental piece as a kind of agnostic Miserere, a voiceless Miserere, although for a Pierrot instrumentation. Instead of voice, two percussionists, acting almost always violently against the Josquin references…

An extremely structured formal architecture aims then to establish far connections to Josquin’s astounding calculations. For instance: the first emergence of Josquin’s fragments (even if always radically transformed) concludes at bar 55, lasting 34” and containing altogether 8 bars, numbers related to the Fibonacci series, but also to my own age in 2017: 55 years old… and so on.

But the harmonic speculations, through which I invented a new Harmonic Entity (named “ALFA” and contrasted with another one, named “BETA”), which first lower 4 notes build the Tristan chord, culminate in a curious “reduction” of the material, reducing the intervals until not having more than three notes: E – Eb – D. This fact drew my attention to the relationship between the title of Miserere and these three notes: Mi = E; se = reversed German Es = Eb; and rere = D D. The Mi-es-re-re, thus E-Eb-D-D motive impregnates therefore the whole piece, and the “reversed” e as 3 in the middle of the title elucidates this reversion related to the German connotation of the Eb. Last but not least, the “3” in the middle of the title gives rise to the emergence of three “Trios” in particular sections of the piece: Mis3rere.

There are altogether 17 sections in the piece, which form is structured by some types of writing:

• Three Klangfarbenmelodien, where a single melodic line is sequentially colored by all the 5 soloists (not considering both percussionists);

• the three Trios, in which three of the 5 soloists play the role of protagonists, while the other two fulfill the texture;

• the five Solos, when a single soloist has a complex solo part, while the other four soloists play the texture;

• the four Josquin’s Fragments, (the last one being the Coda) where the strongly metamorphosed references to Josquin deal his excerpts rather as materials than as quotations properly said;

• one Fuga/Heterophony: yes, I wrote a “fugue”, which can also be heard as a “heterophony” of the same line with totally independent time for each one of the 5 soloists (“the same idea changed by its aspect”, as the heterophony was once defined by Pierre Boulez);

• and a Codetta, where all soloists are gradually inserted to the chords of the piano, playing the final homophonic texture.

Besides many other procedures (as rhythmic rotations and so on), I apply in the piece some of my personal intervallic techniques, specially the cyclic modules (MC) and the proportional projections (PP) – both invented in the 1980ties and developed until today –, but also a recent technique from 2015, cyclic reversions for chords, and a technique for melodic constitutions that I invented (based on Klaus Huber’s interlocking) while discussing it with Michael Jarrell at the Brian Ferneyhough Courses in Royaumont, France, in… 1995 (!): retroactive interlocking, that I revisited here after so many years. The distinct types of formal structures are intercalated, with the discrimination of its main harmonic materials for each one of the 17 sections – from A to Q – of the piece.