Mochizuki: Intermezzi V

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Description

World premiere: Osaka/Japan, Phoenix-Hall, February 23, 2013

The "Intermezzi" cycle (I for flute and piano; II for solo koto; III for solo percussion; IV for clarinet and piano as a prelude to Brahms' Sonata op 120/1; and V for viola and accordion) was inspired by Roland Barthes' (1915-1980) theory of "fragmented discourse". Many of his books are written without a predetermined order of argument, and feature a multitude of different themes that follow one another, creating unexpected associations as you read. This rhetorical form embodies the simultaneity of several levels of thought, the mutual collision and densification of concepts. in a constantly shifting terrain, the attentive reader has no choice but to generate a new kind of synthesis. Little by little, through small steps of thought, a unified view is prepared; it is accomplished precipitously and crystallizes into a new perspective. Perhaps this is an elegant way of grasping the unfathomable by accumulating the multiplicity of its manifestations in a comprehensible way. in the way my music is perceived, I seek a similar experience that disengages me from strict planning of compositional form and technique. My musical ideas have the appearance of improvisation, of an uncalculated process: my music takes on its meaning only in the exact moment when the events unfold.

So when I began composing "Intermezzi V" in 2013, the first thing that came to mind was the principle of biogenesis, the theory that a single life cycle of an animal reproduces in condensed form the evolution of its species as a whole. This image enabled me to apprehend the unusual viola/accordion combination in terms of its evolution over time: the viola is both a new and an old instrument, existing since around the 16th century, although standardization of its form and role, particularly as a solo instrument, has only been established relatively recently. As for the accordion, while it only took shape in the early modern era, its fundamental concept dates back some 2,500 years to the Shô, an ancient Asian mouth organ consisting of a circle of bamboo pipes.

I wonder whether these evolutions are as linear or unidirectional as they appear; rather, I imagine that they proceed by simultaneous derivations in various directions, equal and isotopic, in the image of biogenesis, where all species have the same status and rank. It's a bit like "YouTube", a virtual space where past and present converse, and where the various constituent elements of our world can come together. It resonates with "the multiple ways of thinking that fragmented forms give rise to, and the laws of visual perspective that derive from the multiplicity of points of view", so dear to Roland Barthes.

(Misato Mochizuki)