Programme note
During the Middle Ages, Guido d’Arezzo, who is regarded as the father of modern music-notation, derived a sol-fa system in which he made the vowels of words equivalent to different musical pitches. Ever since then, composers have used soggeti cavati – literally “themes carved out of words” – in all sorts of ways as a compositional technique.
We find it in the music of the Renaissance – in works by Josquin des Pres and Palestrina, amongst others – and in those of the musicus poeticus (“musical poet”) of the Baroque, where the music of Schütz provides a good example. The numerology of Bach is a related phenomenon, and the practice of deriving musical motifs from words has been continued for centuries by many well-known composers, through Schumann and Liszt, to Shostakovich in our own day.
In do-re-mi-fabriek I set myself the task of first systematically and carefully working out the basic compositional materials before I started the creative process itself.
Since the work as commissioned had to be a pièce d’occasion for SAMRO’s Thirtieth Anniversary, I decided to try and turn the names “SAMRO” and “Gideon Roos” into sound-figures, and then go on to weave them into the fabric of the composition. A similar sound-game, in which the sequence and combination of pitches are suggested by a statistical model, is also present in some of my other works – Anagram, Chronicles, Circle of Light and Die Sonnevanger, for example.
For the listener, however, it is not really necessary to know precisely how the sound-patterns are derived, or that thirty different chords are in fact used, but simply that it is all thematic material which undergoes a metamorphosis during the course of the work. But a composition is not just the result of its manufacturing process. The way it is interwoven with the composer’s poetic sound-palette and how it expresses his inner spiritual voice is essentially more important.
There are four sections: the first is a bubbling Allegro con moto, and is followed by a Larghetto. Here pizzicato strings carry on a dialogue in relaxed mood with the bass-clarinet. The third section, Andante, is a Chaconne in which fragments of themes from the first section re-appear. The final section is a brief but appealing Allegro.
The work is dedicated to Gideon Roos
Review
Hans Roosenschoon’s new orchestral work......is a major piece, sporting his usually sumptuous palette,
now nicely tempered by post-avant garde restraint.
(Cloete, Johan. 1 February 1993, THE ARGUS)
Rörich, Mary. 8 December 1992, BUSINESS DAY
Kooij, Pieter, 30 January 1993, DIE BURGER
Brommert, Beverley. 30 January 1993, CAPE TIMES