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Jürgen Kruse: Piano Still unfinished, Boulez’s Third Sonata, begun in 1955, is an enormous program in which the solo instrument draws the formal consequences of a serialism applied to all parameters: a form whose components are not supposed to be completely fixed once and for all but are intended to create for the performer a space for individual initiative to engage in the process of realization. Originally the Third Sonata was supposed to consist of five “formants”—Boulez introduced this neologism in 1953: a metaphor borrowed from acoustics, it was intended to make a distinction from traditional formal thinking that speaks of movements, suggesting instead that that just as timbre results from the structure of partials, now the form of the work should result from a constantly renewed unfolding of its component, which are all derived from the same initial structure. Consequentially, the sequence of formants, unlike the temporal arrangement of the movements of a classical sonata, becomes relative, without resorting to the pragmatism of options of the Baroque suite. It is rather analogous to an arabesque that shapes the structure of a chord; the formants are organized in their mutual relationships according to the function imposed on them by the initial structure. Of the five formants originally planned (Antiphonie, Trope, Constellation, Strophe, Séquence) only two have been published thus far: Trope and Constellation (in retrograde form, Miroir). Its formal arrangement was conceived in such a way that the sequence can be substituted in circular fashion, revolving around the central piece, Constellatoin/Miroir. In terms of the technique of the instrument, Constellation/Miroir pushes the efforts to explore the specific acoustic characteristics of the piano to the extreme. Going beyond the structural use of register and types of touch, the main interest is in resonances and overtones that are elicited by sympathetic vibration of strings caused by depressing keys silently. As a result, on either side of the isolated points it sometimes results in an unfolding of the blocks of sounds into configurations of arpeggios of ever richer material, sometimes in an inner life of sound units by simply dislocating their internal components as soon as their own harmonic resonances emerge. The Polish composer Magdalena Buchwald was born in Zlotow in 1972. In 1992 she began studying musicology at the University of Posen and subsequently studied composition at the Posen Conservatory Andrzej Koszewski and Lidia Zielinska from 1993 to 1999. In parallel with that she studied music theory and new media at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart (analysis with Matthias Hermann and Helmut Lachenmann, electronic music with Ulrich Süße and David Mason). Between 2001 and 2004 she did postgraduate work at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst with Isabel Mundry and Jörg Birkenkötter. Magdalena Buchwald lives in Frankfurt am Main as a freelance composer. Her music is regularly performed in Poland, France, and Germany. |
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