Possible Cities / Essential Landscapes

Eivind Buene (guest composer): Possible Cities / Essential Landscapes

Cikada

Christian Eggen, conductor

This chamber music cycle is written on initiative from the Cikada ensemble. The pieces have been performed seperately between 2005 and 2010, by Cikada, Ensemble Intercontemporain and other ensembles. Cikada premiered the piece the whole cycle as a continous performance in Oslo in 2009.

Part I of the cycle is titled Possible Cities and part II Essential Landscapes. The titles, and much of the inspiration for the music, is from Italo Calvinos book Invisible Cities. His novel 'Invisible Cities' is (among other things) a poetic meditation on construction and decay, on human inginuity and the inevitable forces of nature. The cycle moves from the image of the city in part I, with its tightly structured activities, towards the more organic developments and the openness of landscape in part II. Thus a central image is the friction between nature and culture, between the constructed object and the found object, between monument and ruin.

And Marco answered: ”While, at a sign from you, sire, the unique and final city raises its stainless walls, I am collecting the ashes of other possible cities that vanish to make room for it, cities that can never be rebuilt or remembered. (Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities p. 60)

Contemplating these essential landscapes, Kublai reflected on the invisible order that sustain cities, on the rules that decreed how they rise, take shape and prosper, adapting themselves to the seasons, and then how they sadden and fall into ruins. At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformities and discords [...]  (Ibid, p. 122)

It is not the voice that commands the story: It is the ear. (Ibid, p. 135)

At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again. (Ibid, p. 136)

Possible Cities

Possible Cities is the first piece in a the cycle Possible Cities / Essential Landscapes for ensemble. As the title of this piece suggests, the cycle is  relating to the idea of the city. One of the aspects of the city is that it is a stage of human interaction within networks and structures that seem chaotic and random, but at the same time constitutes finely tuned evolving organisms. The interaction between the musicians in the ensemble provides a metaphor for this idea, and my primary aim has been to investigate different levels of social interaction, of playing together. The unstable, provisionary nature of the city is also something that the transitory quality of music relates to.

Possible Cities is made up of four sections, played as one continuous movement. The first section is a symposium of voices going in and out of polyphonic and heterophonic structures, the second section is concerned with the idea of a grid. Like the different grids of the city (streets, electricity, etc) the timestructure of this music is containing, limiting and shaping the musical forces. The third section has the title 'two intermezzi' and presents almost naivistic melodies and rythms, in order to portray two basic social modes of interaction: singing and dancing. In the last section the voices of the symposium re-emerges, but this time the ensemble is gradually disfigured into a kind of unstable mass, where the sense of individuality is vanishing.

Landscape with Ruins

This piece may be played in three different versions. As Piano Trio, as Piano Quintet or with an ensemble of nine players. The following text refers to the version for Piano Trio. In the Trio the traditional relationship between the two strings and the piano is altered: The strings are treated as one entity, always operating together. The piano, on the other hand, follows a different trajectory. After the initial outburst, the pianist creates an open harmonic landscape where the two stringplayers fold out a series of fragments, moments of rapid gesture and sustained notes. These string-fragments are gradually eroded and condensed through the course of the piece, while the piano part is gradually expanding from singular notes, via chords of increasing density, to flowing streams of sound towards the end. When the piano has reached this point, the strings becomes the landscape, the same harmonic field that originally was heard in the piano. And with this change of perspective, the piece ends.

Ultrabucolic studies

The pieces of Ultrabucolic Studies are short investigations of different aspects of Possible Cities for 9 players. Details of timbre, melody, rythm and musical gesture are focused on and worked out in four short pieces, with durations from one to six minutes. Ultrabucolic Studies belong to the Chamber Music Cycle Possible Cities/Essential Landscapes, but it can also be performed as an independent work.

Nature Morte

Nature Morte is the last part of the chamber music cycle Possible Cities / Essential Landscapes, written for Cikada between 2005 and 2008. This piece is a kind of coda in the cycle, and opens up to other perspectives than the ones predominant in my music. Nature Morte sums up the basic material in the cycle in an unbalanced form, and in two different ways: As monument and as ruin.