Mar violento

Com­plex tex­tures com­pel par­tic­u­lar modes of lis­ten­ing. Sev­er­al lines, redun­dant amongst them­selves in their mor­phol­o­gy, divert our atten­tion to their inter­re­la­tions instead. A homo­phon­ic chorale, for exam­ple, is per­ceived as a block, despite the inter­nal coher­ence and melod­ic inde­pen­dence of its voic­es. Har­mo­ny is what emerges instead as per­cep­tu­al­ly salient — that is, the total sum of the voic­es’ inter­val­ic rela­tion­ships, not their melod­ic contour.

The same hap­pens with the exact oppo­site. The absence of any kind of mor­pho­log­i­cal redun­dan­cy — when all lines are too dif­fer­ent amongst them­selves — also pro­motes a gen­er­al and tex­tur­al lis­ten­ing. In this case, the per­cep­tion of voic­es — if their extreme inter­nal vari­ety even allows them to be per­ceived as such, that is — gives way to anoth­er kind of glob­al hear­ing: one that is much more sen­si­tive to tim­bre and dynam­ics instead. Out­lines sharp­en in relief, sug­gest­ing an almost pic­to­r­i­al game between fig­ure and ground.

These two extremes delin­eate a con­tin­u­um between tex­tures of lines which are high­ly redun­dant and lines which are high­ly dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed. This piece exploits and explores that con­tin­u­um, gen­er­at­ing and con­trol­ling com­plex tex­tures built out of the ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal accu­mu­la­tion of son­ic events.

In this imag­i­nary con­tin­u­um between redun­dan­cy and sin­gu­lar­i­ty, heteropho­ny would occu­py some­thing of a mid­dle ground. Het­eropho­ny was always a par­tic­u­lar­ly dear com­po­si­tion­al resource to Luciano Berio — one he would explore through­out his career. His orches­tral works expand on het­eropho­ny as he received it from Debussy and Mahler. After reach­ing its mature expres­sion in the ​’80s, in pieces such as Requies or For­mazioni, it becomes a sta­ple of his writ­ing until the end of his life. While also con­ceiv­ing of mate­r­i­al as point and mass, this writ­ing retains a clos­er con­netion to tra­di­tion­al orchestration.

This piece also joins the long and sto­ried suc­ces­sion of works evok­ing the sea. Its incred­i­ble force and unfath­omable dimen­sion — ​“era muito difí­cil frente a mim/​compreender esse ter­ritório abso­lu­to”, wrote José Tolenti­no Men­donça – has insti­gat­ed com­posers in the direc­tion of sys­tem­at­ic metaphors such as bar­ca­role rhythms that mime its waves, bril­liant fifth-based har­monies that sug­gest the sil­ver sheen of its sur­face, or hero­ic tut­tis that evoke the mar­itime epics of lit­er­a­ture. Many of these sys­tem­at­ic metaphors are still employed today. How­ev­er, a very observ­able shift in the con­ven­tions of its depic­tion has tak­en place. What seems to beguile both the com­posers of today and as well as those from before, when fac­ing the sea, is its awe-inspir­ing pres­ence, well beyond our human scale. The ver­ti­cal, hero­ic tut­tis have been hol­lowed out, in detri­ment of the depths of the orches­tral reg­is­ter. Like­wise, dense har­monies of drag­ging under­cur­rents have since replaced that sur­face sheen. It is as if we have been swal­lowed by the sea, no longer capa­ble of nav­i­gat­ing its surface.