GEORGES LENTZ - composer
 
 

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About 'Mysterium' ("Caeli enarrant..." VII) In 1994, I started work on a large-scale work-in-progress which I called 'Mysterium' ("Caeli enarrant..." VII). "Caeli enarrant..." ("The Heavens are telling..." - Psalm XIX) is an ongoing cycle of works reflecting my fascination with astronomy as well as my spiritual questions and beliefs. 'Mysterium', the seventh part of this cycle, is a conceptual work in an open form, consisting of numerous blocks that can be put together ad libitum. It is originally a work without fixed instrumentation - abstract lines and dots, ideally meant to be read rather than played. This may sound somewhat naïve, even pretentious - it is hard to attempt this kind of project without seeming overly ambitious. The initial stimulus to launch myself into this idealistic project came to me after reading about Pythagoras' poetic notion of the Music of the Spheres, music which, according to the great Greek thinker, is produced by the friction of the heavenly spheres and is audible to God, but inaudible to human ears. I wanted to write music which does not evolve or unfold, but simply 'is'. The only way to achieve this seemed to be to write music which 'doesn't sound' and thus is not subject to the arrow of time - the symmetrical seven-tone sequence D-E-F-G-F-E-D at the centre of the work also points to this (vain) attempt to defy the one-directional flow of time. In the real world of course, this music - like any music - needs performers to make it come to life. While a performance, as opposed to a reading, might limit the infinite possibilities of the concept in terms of structure and timbre (as well as putting it into the time flow), it is nevertheless really the only way to communicate the work. 'Mysterium' is mostly soft, and tension results mainly from the polarity between sound and silence, tonal and quarter-tone elements, homophonic lines and complex polyphonic material, a regular crotchet beat and graphically notated rhythmic unpredictability, expanded and contracted time. My overall aim was to write music that would be as 'pure' as possible. Hence the severe self-imposed restrictions in terms of dynamics (little dynamic contrast), texture (homophonic writing - a result, perhaps, of my love of Gregorian chant) and rhythm (basic crotchet pattern). However, this crotchet pattern or 'grid' is often broken by two symbols above the music which make the note they refer to either four times shorter (i.e. semi-quavers) or four times longer (i.e. semi-breves). The effect produced is one of 'limping' bars with very uneven beats. The extreme loneliness, the great silence and a sense of existential fragility found in the Australian Outback have greatly influenced 'Mysterium' - as has Australian Aboriginal art , in particular the paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910 - 1996), Kathleen Petyarre (b. 1940) and Dorothy Napangardi (b. 1952), with their highly expressive worlds of symbolism and spirituality. The characteristic dots found in their works (as in a lot of Aboriginal art), in Kngwarreye's case often over the top of hidden lines, have been a direct influence on my current music. Other main influences include: (a) the book Pensées by the 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal - particularly the passages about 'l'infiniment grand et l'infiniment petit'; (b) fractal geometry (or at least what basic ideas of it I can grasp); (c) palimpsests, i.e. texts or layers written on top of each other, which I see in everything from graffiti to geology - a metaphor for the impermanence of all things (d) trees - silent companions of our lives, which we often treat with so much contempt. As well as living trees, I also particularly love the 'dead' gum trees that litter the Outback in their thousands, a constant reminder of the great cycle of life. Their stark shapes with complex, interwining lines always fill me with musical ideas; (e) the tension between my chosen home, Australia, and my European background. I am pulled back and forth between continents and have tried to turn this geographic tension into a creative one in my music. (On the European side, especially my home town of Echternach with its former Benedictine abbey, as well as the Benedictine abbey of Clervaux in Luxembourg's North, where I love to stay with the monks whenever I can, are still important to me. It was upon my publishers' suggestion that I started putting together some of the blocks that make up the work, giving performers an idea of how 'Mysterium' might be performed. They thus have a finished piece with a beginning and an end and with a definite instrumentation! Birrung, written in 1997, is the first such arrangement. (My recent pieces Ngangkar, Nguurraa and Guyuhmgan have evolved again away from this rather austere side of 'Mysterium' towards a slightly more sensuous idiom and one written directly for a given intrumentation.) The words that perhaps best sum up my spiritual attitude these days would be '...and yet'. I can't help doubting many (all?) of the religious dogmas that were inculcated into me as a child, and yet I still have a belief in a higher (metaphysical) reality. Of course, this may or may not turn out to be a utopia. My way of questioning these ideal worlds in my music, however, is usually not by shattering them through ff-outbursts, (in my opinion a cliché), but rather through the use of silence - the most glorious sound, in one way, but also the most terrible, terrifying one. We all know that eternal silence is our common 'final destination'. Hence my music is, to my mind, also and above all about the problem of bearing this silence, about the problem of our existential loneliness. While any number of interpretations are of course allowed, one possible way to listen to 'Mysterium' might be to forget all the above-mentioned technical details and simply imagine a starlit sky with all its different constellations and concentrations, its darkness and light, the vastness of its silence. G. L. 2003 Finished works within 'Mysterium':   -Birrung for 11 strings (1997-2006) -Ngangkar for orchestra (1998-2000) -Nguurraa for clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion (2000-2001) -Guyuhmgan for orchestra and electronics (2000-2007) -Alkere for prepared piano (2002-2004) -Monh for solo viola, orchestra and electronics (2001-2005) -Ingwe for solo electric guitar (2003-2009)       View a page from the score of 'Mysterium'.