Cf. my paper Towards a New Musical Paradigm
CONSTANTINOPLE
and the Aesthetics of Cultural
Inclusion
Christos Hatzis
September 2000
Background
The beginnings of Constantinople, a
seventy-five minute long multimedia work for violin, cello, piano,
mezzo-soprano, an Arab classical female vocalist (alto) and surround sound
digital audio date back to 1998
when Roman Borys, the cellist of the Gryphon Trio, Canada’s pre-eminent chamber
group of that configuration, approached me with a request for a new composition
for the trio. He had caught me at a time when I was convinced that what the
world did not need was one more twenty-minute piece of chamber music. I was
thrilled on one hand by the idea of writing a work for this young, very talented
and dynamic group of artists, but my own artistic disposition at the time was in
favour of exploring larger forms. I was in the midst of writing a 70-minute Kyrie
at the time of our first contact. I was particularly interested in the concept
that a singe work by a single composer could sustain itself as the content of an
entire evening’s presentation.
It turned out that the members of the Gryphon Trio
were at a similar crossroads in their own musical development as an ensemble and
that the wish to get our feet wet at something that we had never tried before
was mutual. I was waiting for an opportunity to do something that involved
visual media, particularly media that incorporated some of the more recent
technological breakthroughs in staging and audiovisual projection, in
conjunction with virtuosic performance on stage. The latter was of particular
importance in my conception. Quite often in such presentations, the live element
is dwarfed by the heavy technology. To keep the focus on stage, the energy level
of the live performers, and by extension of the music they play, must be the
energy level of a chamber music performance multiplied to the power of ten.
Pop musicians who perform in large stages with a lot of audiovisual
technology are keenly aware of this problem, but it takes a lot of adjusting for
classical chamber music performers to get into that mindset. It so happened that
shortly before our meeting the Gryphon Trio had performed the Dmitri
Shostakovich Seven Romances with renown mezzo-soprano Jean Stilwell using
a light designer to create appropriate lighting for the presentation and the
success of that experiment had whetted their appetite for more along the lines
of lighting and/or otherwise visually complemented performances of chamber
music. This was of course a first step in the right direction. What we had in
mind for Constantinople was much more than a discreet light scheme for
primarily a concert performance.
All
of us were quite impressed by the work of director Robert Lepage and his team of
talented artists. Roman had already located Jacques Collin, the media artist who
was responsible for quite a bit of the visual magic one associates with Lepage’s projects and
had already approached Jacques with the idea of a collaborative project at
roughly the same time he had approached me. Roman and I agreed that for a work
of this length and magnitude it might be preferable to involve a singer in
addition to the piano trio. Jean Stilwell, still fresh from her previous
collaboration with the Gryphon Trio, was the natural first choice. A few weeks later I
heard Maryem Tollar, an alto specializing in classical music of the Arab world,
who also has experience as a ‘blues’ vocalist in concert. I was very
impressed by her voice and her musicality and suggested to Roman that we
consider incorporating her into the project. Maryem's voice was incorporated
into the actual electroacoustic component of Constantinople and became
therefore an indispensable component of the work. Jean and Maryem were the
singers in the concert premiere
The Music
My music nowadays falls into two
distinct categories, both of which are informed by my constant search for a new
musical paradigm that is distinct from the paradigm of classical western music
(I call the latter the “Renaissance Paradigm”) 1. The first
category is informed by this new paradigm (I call it the “New Age Paradigm”)
directly. With the second category of works I try to make sense of the music of
our past and, to a certain degree, our present from this new vantage point. This
latter approach to composition is hermeneutical and engages the listeners in a
‘guided tour’, if you like, of our rich cultural and historical heritage. It
is of course more than a tour. It constantly probes the listeners to evaluate
these cultural experiences, which are assembled and pitted against one another,
in a manner that it would have been virtually impossible from within any
one of these musical cultures alone. In these ‘revisionist’ works, I am
trying to investigate the means by which these experiences can unite rather than
divide our modern and severely fragmented world.
Constantinople is such a work. The aesthetic of Constantinople
were brewing in my mind for quite some time. I wanted to write a piece that was
partly autobiographical, but which could also be viewed as a metaphor for issues
which are of concern to a large number of individuals; a piece which would make
a statement about the larger issues that occupy most of us today, but
articulated in a language that could be understood by a considerably larger
number of listeners than my audience to date, regardless of their musical
literacy.
Whether we are aware of it or not, we all grow up
believing in some kind of utopia. Childhood fairy tales (Walt Disney nowadays)
and our early schooling add to our innate desire to believe that under all the
discord and dissonance in the world there is agreement somewhere, a topos
where everything makes sense and works in harmony with everything else. As we
grow older, we carry this utopia within us and, regardless of whether we are
conscious of it or not, we constantly build bridges between it and reality. My
own path as a composer has led me to examine ways in which seemingly
incompatible or mutually exclusive pieces of the human puzzle, particularly
those which can be causes for conflict, can be fitted together in a way that
they contribute to a greater picture, and yet at no cost to their individual
identity. A great deal of my work to date is a series of musical propositions
for the solution of this particular problem. At different times I have called
this approach “cultural counterpoint”, “cultural convergence” or
“cultural utopia”, although I have now distanced myself from the latter term
(etymologically, the term “utopia” implies that there is no such place in
reality and I stubbornly refuse to believe this).
In
my own rather nationalist schooling and upbringing in Greece (my formative years
as an adolescent were spent under the junta military regime), the term
“Constantinople” came to signify such a utopia: a city frozen in time with
no connection to present day Istanbul (a historically ‘cleansed’ city), but
probably with little connection to the historical Constantinople too, except for
one thing: As the capital of eastern Christendom, Constantinople was the host to
a number of cultures, languages and religious beliefs and struggled for several
centuries to strike a consensus and a balance between east and west. Today,
however, for the residents of the Balkan Peninsula, it is hard to separate
historical fact from fiction. A besieged group consciousness generates utopias
as a substitute for an actual hurtful loss. The “New Jerusalem” utopia was
probably born soon after Emperor Titus razed the actual city of Jerusalem to the
ground. The most painful event in the collective memory of eastern Christendom
was the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, exactly 500 years
before I was born. Soon after that seminal event the myths of the “New
Constantinople” and of the last king who turned into a marble statue to come
back to life again in the fullness of time came to life and lasted for many
generations all the way to my own time, reinforced no doubt by countless ethnic
cleansings which have become and continue to be a dark fact of life in Asia
Minor, the Balkans and the rest of the world. As we grow as human beings we are
forced to re-examine the myths that have nurtured us in our childhood and at that
moment of reckoning we choose to either discard them entirely or transform them
into something deeper and far more universal. For most Christians today, the New
Jerusalem utopia is not associated with any actual territorial claims. It is a
profound metaphor for life after death filtered through a certain belief system.
In my own development as an artist and as a human being, the Constantinople
utopia has gradually transformed into a similar metaphor. It is a place where
East and West converged and coexisted in a dynamic but fertile cohabitation for
the better part of a millennium. It is the meeting place between Islam and
Christianity, between the monophonic East and the polyphonic West, a testing
ground for possible solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems.
I carry these dualities and convergences within me as
part of my heritage. These conflicts run much deeper than the differences
between two very similar cultures, such as the English and the French for
example, and yet in Canada, my adopted country, these smaller differences
threaten to tear the country apart at any moment. Toronto, my home for the past
twenty years, is fast becoming what first millennium Constantinople used to be:
a similar testing ground of unforced cultural convergence, confrontation and
cross-reference. It is a unique city anywhere in the world today in that the
majority of its residents have been born elsewhere; a city where the ethnic
minorities form the majority; a city probably better situated than almost any
other city in the world to succeed in developing the culture of the future
global village. Soon after I arrived here I realized that my Constantinople
utopia could be easily transformed into a metaphor for what Toronto could
potentially become and is in fact already becoming: a meeting place for the
entire world, its ideas and beliefs.
The music of Constantinople is imbued by this
ambition. It is an ultra-eclectic mix of musical genres many of which have
absolutely nothing to do with historical Byzantium and have everything to do
with present day North American urbanism. Classical chamber and ‘larger’
music with electroacoustic sonic extensions and a variety of ‘sound effects’
on one hand, jazz, nineteen-sixties pop, blues, Middle Eastern classical and
folk music on the other. The texts are an equally eclectic assortment of Sufi
poems, Eastern Orthodox liturgical texts, excerpts from the Latin Requiem Mass,
and fragments from a Byzantine epic poem. All of these heterogeneous elements
fuse together in one single statement about the richness of human cultural and
religious heritage, which by now should be bringing us closer to one another
instead of splitting us apart. The message is simple; the means of conveying it
are rather complex. It is easy for an undertaking of this kind to sound either
fragmented, or to simply degrade into a musical travelogue of some kind with no
cohesive centre. In this day and age when ‘world music’ seems to be the
vogue in both the popular and the classical music worlds, we are inundated with
the kind of ‘East meets West’ collaborations that don’t seem to go further
than the level of a cultural handshake or where one of the contributing
viewpoints subjects itself to the other. To go beyond that, a clear and
passionate understanding of the two or more viewpoints is required, as well as
an understanding of how all these viewpoints fit into the larger global puzzle
in a way that the contributing parts, but also the larger picture they all
contribute to, can be seen for what they are. This line of questioning
eventually leads to the very essence of what composition is.
My approach to this question, particularly in Constantinople,
is rather eccentric: if the listeners feel that the music works in spite of the
ingredients, then this compels them to re-evaluate their notions about what
composition actually is, which more often than not is either confused with
narrower recipes of surface organization of similar (and therefore predictable)
musical material, or with something so magical that is totally removed from the
listener’s field of vision. Many devoted listeners of classical music, even
those who are somewhat musically literate, are mystified by the compositional
process, but not by the music itself, which they have grown to know and love, and
understand to a certain degree. By that I mean that even if a listener has
enough theoretical knowledge to be aware of the underlying structural processes
in operation during the aural experience of a classical work, he/she may still
have no understanding of the compositional forces that forge this piece of music
together. Brilliant theorists are not necessarily brilliant composers. Even to a
theorist, certainly to an average concert listener, the essence of the
compositional act remains a mystery.
Unlocking the compositional process for the listeners
is tantamount to unlocking their creativity, or at the very least demystifying
the compositional (creative) process. We are reaching a time in human evolution
when most of us no longer wish to be passive observers to someone else’s
creative explorations. As listeners we are no longer in awe in the presence of
creative genius, at least not the way pre-infoculture listeners have been for
centuries. We want creative genius to be a utility serving us, not the other way
around. In such a climate the works of art we are increasingly attracted to are
either interactive (where the artist creates an environment in which we, the end
users, are the navigators) or engages us in an active manner into the most
fundamental aspects of the creative process. The former approach to this new
public attitude towards creativity explains perhaps the popularity of
interactive video games among the younger generation and some recent attempts at
interactive composition, like Tod Machover’s Brain
Opera. This is the simplest of the two approaches because the role of
the creator and the end user are clearly defined: the creator sets the operating
parameters and the end user can freely navigate within these operating
parameters. The latter approach is a bit more complicated. While the listeners
don’t make actual decisions that affect the outcome of the composition, they
are the center of gravity of the communication process by virtue of the fact that
the composer ‘optimizes’ the composition for his/her target audience and
that it is the composer’s target audience towards which the compositions are
directed. It is very difficult to make a qualifying distinction between works
that center on the listener and those that center on the composer. In many cases
two works with two radically different centers of gravity may sound deceptively
similar. Yet invariably one works with listeners and the other may not.
Before
I continue with this thought let me address a couple of assumptions. They are:
(1) there is a listener out there that can be defined beforehand by the composer
and (2) a concert audience is one sort of listeners. The first is not
really an assumption. The difference between a listener-centered composition and
a composer-centered one is that in the former, the composer does have in mind a
specific listener who can decode in real time (during the performance) the
information the composer has encoded into the music. The number of listeners
that are capable of doing this type of decoding is the composer’s target
audience. The second assumption too is warranted. Listeners who are also
subscribers to the local symphony concert season, for example, are to varying
degrees aware of the specific, principally common practice repertory that most
orchestras like to program, and also they are either consciously or
unconsciously aware of the vocabulary and syntax of the common practice musical
language Again in this case the difference between the listener-centered and the
composer-centered work is in whether or not the composer is encoding musical
information for a specific target audience to decode, in this case the average
symphony orchestra concertgoer 2.
Beyond
the question of encoding and decoding, there is also the issue of empathy with
regards to the listeners. In the case of a pop music concert, listeners are
already ‘primed’ by the electronic media of music dissemination so that they
are totally familiar with the music they are about to hear. Most listeners have
sang these tunes so many times in advance that they in fact ‘own’ them by
the time they enter the concert space. When they sing along with their favourite
pop stars during the concert, they become active participants in the
communication process, not just passive listeners. This empathy between the
audience and the stage was also evident in classical music during the common
practice era. Listeners understood the operating language enough so that they
actively engaged in a guessing game with the composer (with regards to harmonic
progression, for example) while the composer either confirmed or betrayed
audience expectations through the music being performed. Beyond this
intellectual game that may or may not have been conscious on the part of the
audience, the listener and the composer navigated on compositional waters
that were familiar to both and therefore the listener felt at home during the
navigation process. This familiarity is breeding ground for empathy on the part
of the listener. The occasional musical innovation in the score was evaluated
against this background of familiarity and because of this it had a startling
effect on the listener. In Constantinople, the foreground music actively
cultivates this familiarity with the listener. The melodic and harmonic profile
of the music constantly ‘teases’ the listener’s memory, and the
predominant structural means in the work is repetition and/or continuous
variation. In Kyrie, for example (a movement from Constantinople),
the vocal line constantly repeats the main melodic idea while the instrumental
lines are engaged in continuous variation of the accompanying music. This not
only allows the listener to become familiar with the music with even a single
hearing, but it also allows for the sections of the music where this is not
happening to be offset as special moments in the work, thus enabling the
listener to connect to the background structure of the work, which is
articulated in terms of semantic density among other things.
Another
factor contributing to this condition of empathy on the part of the listener is
the rich semiotic connections that exist in the music. In Kyrie, each
variation of the accompanying music is in a style that is geographically and
chronologically distant from what precedes and follows it. This interplay of
chronology and geography in the work is another perceptual game for the listener
to engage in, but it is also central to the main (extra-musical) theme of Constantinople,
which is cultural convergence.
From the beginning, Constantinople has been
conceived as a listener-centered work. At a conscious level certain decisions
have been made in advance that are geared towards making the work an immersive
experience for the listener. These include:
1. The development of the theatrical aspect of the work that is not based on text, but on acting out the music itself in a way that it engages the listener viscerally rather than intellectually.
2.
The creation of visuals and lighting tightly coordinated with the sound
and the performers on stage that match in content and presentation the intensity
of the music.
3.
The use of quadraphonic sound system, with sound reaching the audience
from the front and the back.
4.
The use of musical styles, vocabulary and syntax that goes beyond the
conventions of classical and/or contemporary-classical music.
5.
The use of ‘choreography’ and stage direction, so that the performers
become considerably more than the incorporeal musical interpreter one is
accustomed to in classical chamber music, and begin to assume aspects of the
“performer persona” as the latter has been visually and gesturally developed
in the world of popular music.
One may ask what is the difference between this and
music theater? Fundamentally one: music theater is text driven or at least has
some linear story line at its core, while Constantinople is first and
foremost musical composition and concert performance visually, theatrically and sonically
expanded. Conceptually, it is closer to the MTV type music video or concert
performance, but of course with a completely different orientation and goal.
Furthermore, the work and its stage presentation will alternate rapidly between
the small and intimate (sections of acoustic music for piano trio with minimal
visual and acoustical amplification) to the full-blown (maximal outbursts of
visual and acoustical information more akin to a rock concert than to chamber
music) with everything in between.
The Movements
Constantinople is in seven movements with an added pop song at the very end (the inclusion of which is still a matter of debate among the creative members of the team). The movements are:
Creeds for mezzo-soprano, alto, and digital audio followed by the piano trio
Kyrie for mezzo-soprano, piano trio and digital audio towards the end of the movement
Odd World for piano trio
Ah Kalleli for alto and digital audio with an interlude for the piano trio
On Death and Dying for mezzo-soprano, alto piano trio and digital audio with the recorded voice of Lambros Vassiliou on tape
Old Photographs for piano trio
Alleluia for mezzo-soprano, alto piano trio and digital audio with a cameo appearance by the English Chamber Choir.
The music is in seven distinct movements that sometimes follow one another without interruption.
Creeds, the opening movement, starts with "Christos Anesti", the Byzantine Easter chant of the resurrection sung in Greek by the mezzo-soprano, while the Middle-Eastern singer (alto) intones a similar creed from the Islamic faith. After this vocal introduction of religious dichotomy but also beauty (both Christian and Islamic chants are especially beautiful), the cello enters with new material which occasionally sounds like variations of the "Christos Anesti" opening motif accompanied by predominately drone-like material in the digital audio most of which originated from a CD developed by Ernest Cholakis 3. The combination of the occasionally "industrial" sounding drones and the amplified cello introduces an element of pop music into the mix the first of several in the piece. The solo cello section leads into a Turkish dance for the piano trio common among Balkan music cultures (in Greece it is called tsifteteli) which places great technical demands on the violin with its semi-improvisatory (but strictly notated) material and to the piano trio as a whole with its constantly shifting metric modulations.
The main melody of Kyrie is borrowed from an earlier work by the same title, my 70-minute Kyrie (1997), but it is presented here in a completely different light. This latter incarnation of the melody undergoes a series of geographic and chronological displacements in the instrumental part while it maintains its medieval character throughout. These displacements emphasize the universality of the original melody and the renewed relevance of Medieval thought to 21st century thought in general. First there are three separate settings of a long string consisting of twelve statements of the words "Kyrie Eleison" ("Lord Have Mercy Upon Us"), a standard orthodox ritual practice. These vocal utterances are accompanied first by string harmonics and ambient piano chords, followed by piano alone and finally by the violin and the cello creating contrapuntal lines that often emphasize the medieval character of the vocal melody. In the last of these repetitions/variations of the main melody, the digital audio introduces a rather sudden pop element into the mix made more dramatic by the low bass punctuated syllables on the speakers and the "blues" vocalizing of the mezzo-soprano. The latter is in a 7/8 meter running constantly against the 7/4 meter of the rest of the ensemble (in other words with off-the-beat downbeats every other measure). As in the following movement, odd meters are used to heighten the tension in the music. Since these odd-numbered structures repeat constantly, however, they are not "odd" for long as far as the listeners are concerned. Soon these meters establish in the listeners' mind a different kind of symmetry than the one most listeners are familiar with and entice them to enter this unusual musical world.
Odd World, the third movement and the first of two purely instrumental movements in the entire work, follows. Odd World takes its name from its rather eclectic musical content, which ranges from Celtic fiddling to Stravinsky, Brahms and anything in between, but also from the fact that the work has an odd-numbered rhythmic and formal structure. The piece is in 5/8 and each phrase is 7 measures long. Larger sections of the movement also reflect odd-number relationships. After a while these odd meters and phrases come to be expected as a matter of course so the music sounds much more symmetrical and consistent than one might expect given its numerical makeup.
Ah Kalleli is a an electroacoustic setting of an old Sufi song designed to highlight Maryem Tollar's haunting voice. The music of the original song was composed by Muhammad ‘Uthman (Egypt 1855-1900), but the texts are considerably earlier; they were written by Sana’ il-Mulk (Egypt 1155-1211). The text is a poetic adoration of clouds and goes as follows: "O clouds adorn the crowns of the hills with garlands/And make the bending stream a bracelet for them/O sky, in you and in the earth there are stars/Every time a star sets, many other stars rise". Partly due to the atmosphere created by the text and partly due to the Maryem's peculiar voice and my desire to bring to the fore certain aspects of that voice which normally lay hidden, the bulk of this movement consists of pre-taped segments of her voice processed by a number of DSP software on a Mac computer and then sequenced on a Steinberg VST sequencer. The aural effect is that of vocal "clouds" into which Maryem's voice dissolves and then emerges again. This very ambient treatment is interrupted in the middle by an instrumental interlude for the piano trio in which the main theme of Ah Kalleli is treated in a manner reminiscent of jazz music. Maryem joins the trio briefly before joining the digital audio again for the closing segment of the work which includes an extended vocal cadenza. Ah Kalleli, ends the first part of Constantinople which for the most part introduces musical elements and genres but does not attempt to synthesize them, at least not to the degree that is evident in the second half of the work.
In On Death and Dying the tone of the composition deepens both in terms of subject matter and musical treatment. This movement was composed while my father was struggling with cancer and shortly before he passed away. This man and his heroic stance against life and death has always been for me the standard against which I measure myself as a human being and find myself lacking. On Death and Dying, one of the most powerful movements in the entire work marks the first time the two female voices—representing two different worlds, two cultural paradigms—sing together. Up until now the mezzo-soprano (representing the Christian west) and the alto (representing the Islamic east) have represented their separate worlds separately. As I mentioned earlier, On Death And Dying was composed during a trying period in my life, as my father was in the last weeks of fighting a loosing battle with cancer. He was a man of uncommon courage and, as I was contemplating his life and his influence on me, the very old poem of "The Death of Dighenis", a Byzantine frontier hero, came to my mind. In the poem Dighenis (which in Greek means "one of dual parentage or heritage", in his case Greek and Arab) the hero engages in a physical struggle with Death, and Death cheats in order to win while the Earth shudders at the thought of covering him. This medieval popular view of death and the dread of death is in sharp contrast to the opening chant of the resurrection ("Christ has conquered Death through death") but up until now has been resonating more with most of us than the wonderful metaphysical message of life after death proposed by the Easter chant. The Dighenis song, an original song composed in the style of old Cretan folk music, is introduced by Maryem as a passacaglia or a ground. She is gradually joined in this miroloi or funeral song by the mezzo-soprano, the cello, the violin and the piano—in that order. At the climax of this passacaglia-like treatment, the digital audio introduces sounds of human struggle and heavily processed fragments of the opening of the Dies Irae from Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, and the music on stage quickly shifts to a Mozart-like rendering of the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) text featuring frantic writing for the instruments accompanied by sounds of modern warfare assaulting the audience from both the front and back speakers. After the Dies Irae setting is completed, the music returns to the Dighenis setting and introduces the first of the two ‘virtual’ performers in Constantinople, Greek singer Lambros Vassiliou on tape. Lambros’ haunting voice initiates a new passacaglia, which, like in Kyrie, undergoes stylistic transformation with each repetition. It starts as a Cretan folk song, followed by a setting reminiscent of Renaissance counterpoint, and finally in a full instrumental and vocal configuration it turns into nineteen-sixties pop music featuring an electric guitar-like solo for the violin.
Old Photographs provides an antidote to the heartrending intensity of the previous movement. It is the other purely instrumental movement in Constantinople and is totally based on western musical idioms. It starts with an introspective theme for solo piano slightly reminiscent of Robert Schumann, which is gradually joined in by the violin and the cello and transforms slowly—‘morphs’ is a better word—into a tango in the style of Astor Piazzola, a light-hearted moment in the work which also foreshadows the rather exuberant and celebratory finale.
Alleluia, the finale of Constantinople is a long setting of the word Alleluia. It starts by revisiting the multitude of themes and musical genres that have appeared in isolation in the work so far, often combining two themes from different movements in counterpoint with one another. The main theme of Alleluia, which first appears in the piano, has an interesting story attached to it. It was offered spontaneously by Maria, my daughter who was ten years old at the time, one day as we were driving to Ottawa. She was bored in the back of the car and started making up tunes to occupy herself during the ride. During the days preceding the trip I was wondering how to bring Constantinople to a conclusion. A work like this that had already included so much in it needed something different for its conclusion and nothing that I had tried up to that point was different enough to function in the manner that I expected the closing movement to function. When Maria started making up this ‘alleluia’ melody, it hit me that a child’s song—that particular spontaneous song—was the fitting conclusion to this work. In Alleluia the melody appears in an unabashed manner every time the music raises a dilemma of some kind with regards to one’s attitude towards the human condition. It provides a prompting from the heart each time the mind stumbles and stalls. And the mind stumbles a few times in the course of this movement. When for example "Hristos Voskrese", the Serbian Easter chant sung by the English Chamber Choir (the second ‘virtual’ performer in Constantinople), gradually turns first into a tragic climax and later into a still moment of nowhere to go, the "Alleluia" theme intercepts the musical indecision by affirming humanity in the midst of human cruelty. When the music of Kyrie returns as a prayer for forgiveness, the Alleluia theme takes over the quietness of the moment of prayer and leads it into the closing celebration of life and perseverance.
Finally....Constantinople, the pop song, may be presented as the movement which follows the finale, paradoxical as that may sound, or as an encore piece. It is for all intents and purposes a pop song on texts by the composer. We are still debating whether or not to include it in the work or allow the work to exist in seven movements as it currently exists in the CBC broadcast recording. Time will tell.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that every time you abandon certain conventions that are ingrained in a given music genre, you lose some audience members who have grown to depend on these conventions for their musical enjoyment. It is almost certain that some members of the audience, particularly avowed “modernists” who associate musical innovation with a specific musical language will find Constantinople not elitist enough in its approach to style and compositional language for their taste. If elitism means a small club with exclusive membership for no other reason than to keep the membership down, then they will be right in finding this work lacking. But for every one of these listeners there will be incomparably more who will relate to Constantinople precisely because it does not adhere to the rather stale classical music conventions of ‘politically correct’ contemporary music. The Gryphon Trio’s (and mine) conscious effort with this work is to infuse new blood to a classical chamber music audience whose numbers are in continuous decline, and do so with no corresponding compromise to the artistic integrity of the work or the presentation as such. This kind of compromise is very common nowadays in classical, particularly symphonic, programming with pops concerts increasingly seen as the antidote to dwindling audiences. In addition to this specific outreach goal, the work aspires to make the rather insular listeners of classical music aware of a new global culture, both classical and popular, which by now has permeated every aspect of contemporary life save the concert halls of western classical music. To do this and not alienate these listeners in the process is the challenge we have taken upon us with this work. The way we have addressed this challenge is by placing the listener at the very center of this multi-sensory experience instead of assuming the more common attitude of “the composer knows best”. In the end of course the listener will be the judge.
1.
Cf. my paper Towards a New Musical Paradigm
2.
Cf. my paper The Orchestra as Metaphor
3.
Ernest
Cholakis: Drone Archeology. Numerical
Sound.
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