In what way did the poetry of Octavio Paz inform the composition of the piece?
Octavio Paz’s poetry was not really on my mind as I wrote the piece, except for the decontextualized, almost magically revelatory line “Mortalidad es transparencia” [mortality is transparency] from which the piece’s title derives. This thought had long fascinated and touched me, and it became all the more reassuring at a time when my mother’s passing was clearly imminent. The fact that she had introduced me to Paz’s poems years earlier just reinforced the meaning for me of those three words.
I’ve never actually tried to formulate a verbal interpretation of the idea that “mortality is transparency” and I hesitate to do so now, firstly because I don’t doubt that it could be understood in ways I haven’t imagined and, more importantly, because the very incantatory power of the phrase for me resides in its indefinable quality. Be that as it may, as I composed the piece I was thinking about it along the following lines. Mortality, the temporal finiteness of beings, makes things transparent in the sense that it enables apprehension of the world through our recognition of beginnings and endings, the “outlines” of existence. At the same time, the transparency afforded by our transitoriness leaves us open to conceive the immaterial and infinite. Beginnings and endings as markers of the eternal…a beautiful paradox that somehow resides at the core of my piece.
What inspired you to write for this particular combination of instruments?
It was precisely the paradox of trying to write personal, ‘expressive’ music for instruments that are not often treated as voices so much as colors, that intrigued me about this admittedly challenging combination of bass drum and four triangles. (I might add that maracas were likewise envisioned at one point for a later movement—also not exactly an instrument that one would ordinarily imagine in the realm of molto espressivo!) Registrally these instruments are at opposite poles of the percussion spectrum, yet they share some important characteristics: persistent resonance; a certain resistance to differentiated articulation; and, as I alluded to earlier, a traditional functionality that rarely acknowledges their potential to speak as a multidimensional voice. Here again, paradox infused my decision to combine them, and so I treat them as incredibly different and yet kindred spirits, two faces of the same musical personality struggling to surmount its limitations. To extend the metaphor further, I suppose that mortality is the ultimate of those limitations.
What prompted you to revise the piece in 2010, and what changes did you make?
To be honest, back in 2004 I’d composed the piece more quickly than I would have liked in order to meet a deadline, and I wasn’t convinced by some of the rhythmic gestures, especially at the beginning. I had my first opportunity to hear a public performance of the work in the fall of 2010, at which point I realized two things. One was that I would never finish Parts II through IV as originally planned and sketched. This cycle of movements had been conceived metaphorically as a ‘life cycle’ in honor of my mother, but when she died shortly after the first performance in Geneva, Switzerland, it rather took the wind out of my sails; her passing seemed to complete the cycle for me before I could complete it myself. Hearing Part I live for the first time finally confirmed this for me. At the same time, since I’d imagined the work in four parts, I realized that the first part sounded too fragmentary on its own. The ensuing revision thus involved extending the piece on both ends so as to ‘complete’ it. I did not add any new material, but in stretching the beginning and ending outward—again, those critical, indispensable margins!—I incorporated a subtle element of repetition whose potential significance I hadn’t understood when first working on the piece.
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Daniel Kennedy will perform Transparency (Part I) on
Monday, October 3, 8:00 pm at Herbst Theatre.
Josh Levine will participate in the pre-concert talk with Steven Schick at 7:15 pm.
For more concert information click here.
