GEORGES LENTZ - composer / sound artist
GEORGES LENTZ - composer / sound artist
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About 'Anyente'
from 'Mysterium' ("Caeli enarrant..." VII) for solo viola (2019-2024) Anyente for solo viola, initially written for the 2020 Bonn Beethoven Festival upon violist Tabea Zimmermann's request, was intended as a short response to that year's Beethoven anniversary celebrations. My original piece was in particular concerned with the composer's deafness and loneliness in his later years (the original working title was in fact "Taub", German for "deaf"). After the contemporary part of that festival was cancelled due to the outbreak of COVID, I put the piece away for a year and only picked it up again to take it with me on a journey to the Australian Outback in 2021. On that trip, I was overwhelmed yet again by the country's deep silence and radiant night skies, and my viola piece started moving beyond its original Beethoven references (even though a few Beethoven hints persist in the final version) to become more generally a meditation on our human fragility and loneliness (Anyente is a word from one of the languages of the people of Eastern Arrernte and means one or alone.) Rhythmically, Anyente became a bit of a trial run for my new violin concerto, which I was also working on at the same time. It was above all a continuation of my work Monh (2001-2005) for viola, orchestra and electronics, also written for Tabea, and Anyente literally picks up where Monh left off. A glittering night sky is pierced again and again by deep, black silence, as if all matter was sucked out of the music / out of the universe. Long, hushed sequences of short notes, inspired by my love of Australian Indigenous art (especially the strings of dotted lines found in Kathleen Petyarre's great paintings), are trying to feel their way through this darkness with uncertain microtonal inflections and tiny irregular accents. This ethereal musical argument progressively turns into its obsessive rhythmical opposite, a hammering of fortissimo chords attempting to establish greater tonal stability, only for this ostinato music to morph into turbulent and contorted melodic bursts which are eventually counterbalanced by long and lonely cantabile lines full of sadness. The work attempts to find a reconciliation between these sharply opposing characters, resting for long stretches in a meditative space, while struggling to break out of one mood into another. The music is eventually taken over once more by its relentless rhythmic drive, before crashing into the depths of a C string tuned down an octave, and disappearing progressively into disembodied nothingness (a niente!) - further highlighting the work's ultimate sense of solitude and resignation. The first performance of Anyente in its final version was given by Tabea Zimmermann at Pierre-Boulez-Saal in Berlin on December 1, 2024.
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