| DATA OF ENTITY |
|
| Titles |
Broken Melody |
| Matrix number |
Άγνωστο |
| Duration |
4.41 |
| Production date |
-/-/2004 |
| Comments |
1995
Works by Stravinski, Varese, Andriessen, Debussy, van Hauwe, Berio and Folks Songs from Japan, Italy and China.
"Playing the harp has an animal-like attraction"
"It all sterted with Piccolo and Saxo; a sort of guide to the orchestra for children by the French composer which tells the story of a piccolo and a saxophone meeting the instruments of the orchestra while on a fairytale-like journey. I mast have been about six years old when I heard the record, and I immediately loved the harp, "says Ernestine Stoop
"It's hard to say what did it. It was a very intuitive affinity I felt. I only know that I fell for the sound. Its quiet beauty, the soft vibrating quality attracted me for reasons I don't know."
"The sound still is the main attraction of the harp to me, and I love physical quality of the right way and in the right place, the whole instruments starts to resonate. You' re in close contact with the harp when you are playing. It feels very direct; there's nothing between me and the instrument. Playing the harp has a physical, animal-like attraction to me. There's a very direct relationship between your fingers and the strings because of the way they push back when you touch them. It is also a very personal instrument. The best position where to pull the string for a certain sound is unique to every instrument. if you want to get everything out of the instrument it has to offer, you have to play with your whole body. It's not only the finger that makes the sound but the whole movement behind the way you touch the string."
"The harp is not good at fast chromatic scales because of its diatonic tuning and fast wide leaps are difficult. But because of the innumerable ways you can contact the strings, it has a wealth of very subtle colour shadings. No instrument can whisper so beautifully soft in a tremolo on single note, because you can repeat the same note on two different strings very rapidly. You can make it soynd like a small chime, like little pearls dropping, but you can also produce these warm vibrating low, rich and sonorous basses. With the right movement behind my thumb I can fill a large concert hall and if it's scored well a low bass note is very well heard, even if there's a full orchestra playing."
"Of course there is a problem with the repertoire. THe harp is a beautiful instrument but there's a lot of corny superficial music written for it. Between Carl philip Emanuel Bach and Debussy/Ravel most of the repertoire consists of salon pieces. After the early baroque there is no writing for harp in the overture Prometheus (only because of the subject of the piece) but in his symphonies and in those of Haydn and Mozart there is no harp. Ludwig Spohr wrote a nice Fantasia, as did Carl Philip Emanuel, but Mozart's Concerto for flute and harp is the only big classical piece written especially for the harp and that was only because a commission."
"Until the first decade of the 19th century the harp was a problematic instrument in ensembles. In spite of the invention of the single pedal harp around 1720 (which allowed to tune up each individual string by half a step so that you didn't have to keep to one tonality) it still was a bit slow in changing key by resetting the pedals that shortened the strings. Only after the double pedal mechanism was introduced, alowing you to tune up both half a step and a whole step, the instrumen became truly chromatic. Berlioz was one of the first to use this new instrument in his Symphony Fantastique."
"Probably because the harp is not easy to transport, it developed into home-based instrument. It was played at home and, maybe because women stayed in more, mostly by women. In Paris especially, with its powerful bourgeoisei, the harp developed into a salon instrument. It simply acquired a somewhat superficial entertainment image which attracted a certain type of not too profound oriented, commercially oriented composers. Only with Debussy this changed. The harp was very well-suited to his painting with colors and he changed the image of the harp completely. Contemporaries like Puccini and Mahler used the colors in the orchestra but the solo repertoire really begins with Debussy and Ravel."
"No Debussy and Ravel on this CD though. I chose only recent works from about the last decade and only fron composers with whom I have worked personally - four pieces were written especially for me. Aside from the French twentieth century repertoire, my interest lies in contemporary music. I did play in an Orchestra (and I loved it) but I was always most happy playing in ensembles. I'm a regular member of the Nieuw Ensemble (one of Holland's most distinguished contemporary music ensembles RH) since its founding in the early eighties. Working with living composers is great. You can ask them things and when the relationship works well you feel almost as if you join the composer in his work. I didn't write the piece, but if everything worked out well between me and the composer I feel I' m able to play their music as if I wrote it myself."
"I have tried to bring different styles together on one CD, but it was not only a matter of finding contrasting pieces. It had to become a whole. I dropped a beautiful piece by Rodney Sharman, because it wouldn't fot. The Carter piece is thw wildest an the most dissonant so I put that in the center."
"The two Chorales by Louis Andriessen were originally written as pieces for a music box. You can hear it's Andriessen by the harmony, but their mood is not that characteristic for Andriessen. It's quiet music, suited for the soft sound of the music box and that also works well with the harp. The first chorale is a bit sad, even somber in his emphasis on the low register, and the second one is high and light. It seemed logical to place them at the beginning and the end of the CD."
"Calliope Tsoupaki's Pirouette is one of the most lyrical pieces recorded. The pirouette circles in itself. She never asks to dampen the strings. Everything has to resonate freely, which reinforces the meditative character that arises from the cirding movement. Ron Ford's Broken Melody had to came next. In context with Tsoumaki's piece it almost works as a fast movement coming after Pirouette."
"By coincidence, Broken Melody starts with the same notes the pirouette ends with. Although both pieces to me now works as some kind of unity, they are completely different at the same time. Ford is a pupil of Andriessen and maybe that accounts for the pure simplicity and the use of octaves in Broken Melody. He also lets the instrument resonate but his piece is more about the precise way in which the melody in octaves is woven like a patchwork into the rhythm. It's not so much an atmospheric work as Pirouettte.
"In Balance, the work by Isang Yun is the most close to Debussy. Yun fuses the eastern world of his homeland korea with western impressionistic colours and warm Debussy-like harmonies in all of this warks. Debussy was of course inspired by what he knew from eastern music; he was impressed by the gamelan he heard at the world fair in Paris. It's a poetical piece with long drawn outlines. It tells a story in a slowly evolving way that reminds me of eastern fairytales."
"Kaja Saariaho's Fall is part of a cycle about the four seasons. The other pieces are for solo flute, solo viola and harp, viola and flute. It moves much faster than the Yun -a lot of sixteenth notes and a lot of triplets in threes and sixes that work well on the harp- but it also has a lyrical quality. She wants it to sound as if played in dhurdh. So when you perform it in an other space you have to add delay. We added three seconds and that helps to sustain the high pitches which by nature decay faster than low ones."
"Carter's Bariolage is a big contrast compared to the music by Yun and Saatiaho. It's a much more complicated piece, both harmonically and in structure. While Yun and Saariaho work with long melodic lines, Carter thinks in short ones. His thoughts are many and short, so there is a constant change and at first it seems very fragmented. That makes it not only difficult from a technical point of view, but also hard to present as the logical structure it is. It is difficult to get the musical story across. So much happens in seven minutes and you really have to concentrate to bind all these short musical thoughts together."
"When I study, I work intuitively. After I get all the technical stuff right, I woek out my pedals, get the tempo right etc. I begin looking for the links between individual fragments, analyze the piece and than I have to put it all together into a story. I put words in the score to catch what it means to me. I try different colors, play it in the wrong tempo to find out what it should not be and I exaggerate the dynamics to hear why something doesn't feel right in order to know why it is right in an other way. After a while everything gets into place. You could say that I understand a piece by playing it."
"Although Guus JAnssen is a completeley different type of composer than Carter and his Tap-dance hasn't got much in common with Carters music, it has the same short breath and the musical thought is also vertical line-oriented. The music of Guus often ha a self-willed character and a lot of his pieces question something in a humoristic way. In this piece there aren't many normal harp notes. The instrument becomes a percussion instrument and the tap dance referred to in the title is for my feet on the pedals. Besides the harp I also have to play percussion instruments. It is a more a piece against the harp than a piece for harp, but it's done in a way that's fun to do."
"Keyla Orozco's Arpa is a much more straightforward non-conceptual harp piece. It's short, and has again a lot of faster notes like Saatiaho's piece. You can hear that Keyla is from Latin America in the shythm."
"I got to know Paul Davies through the Nieuw Ensemble, for which he wrote something. Judging from my part in that piece, I felt that he had a feeling for the instrument. We played that piece in Berlin where the weather was very gray. Berlin Motives reflects that mood in a small sad piece. For me this is a sort of music I can easily play. It is a simple straightforward impression; concise and clear in its mood."
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| PERSONS | |
| FORD, RON |
Composer |
| AGNOSTOS |
Producer |
| HAUWE, WALTER VAN |
Blockflutes |
| GEENE, JOCHEM |
Editing |
| BLANKESPOOR, EVA |
Mastering |
| YSBRANT |
Cover Painting |
| BROERSE, CO |
Photographs |
| KULPERS, RIEMKE |
Artwork |
| VERSTER, SIEUWERT |
Realization |
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