A Short History of Life
For 4 treble recorders
Willibrord Huisman, 1996
Edition Moeck Nr. 1577, Reihe zeitgenössischer Musik
Moeck Verlag, Celle ISMN M-2006-1577-7
Note: you may order the score plus parts at, e.g.:
Before, you may want to have look at some pages:
- Partial score at Moeck's website:
pdf.
- Idem, local copy:
pdf.
Preface
The following elucidation
of the composition process may be interesting to some players.
However it is not meant as an explanation of the piece to an
audience - the piece should not at all be presented as being
programme music.
The compository principle
used throughout most of the piece is that of evolution. The themes
evolve out of each other, gradually becoming more and more complex,
sometimes reaching unexpected moments of harmony, as if they were
the musical equivalents of Darwin's species. This process, however,
would be perpetual, whereas a piece of music needs an end, and
preferably even a form. Therefore, two evolutionary catastrophies
are brought into play as true dei ex machina.
The first is a sudden
destruction of all complexity - its equivalent in biological life is
the meteor impact that suddenly ended the Cretaceous period, driving
the dinosaurs to extinction.
The second is the
appearance of an over-dominating theme, that eliminates all other
themes one by one, proudly reaching its own harmony, until finally
it reaches its own breakdown, and with that, the breakdown of the
musical life itself.
Readers with a
pessimistic imagination will easily conceive of a proper equivalent
in biological life.
Evolution is more and
more acknowledged as being the basic principle in a wide variety of
processes, life on earth being only one of them. Evolutionary
algorithms can create very efficient structures and procedures,
regardless of scale and environment: cells, organs, organisms,
ecosystems, social and economic systems, computers. The notion that
evolution is such a wide-spread phenomenon gave birth to the idea
that a musical piece based on it should have a natural esthetic
quality, regardless of whether the listener realises that evolution
is taking place. Therefore, a listener might just as well interpret
the titel as A short history of a life, or follow any
other interpretation in which a process is taking place, or no
interpretation at all.
Willibrord Huisman
Review
The
Recorder Magazine Vol. 19, No. 3, Autumn 1999, S. 95
A brief biographical note
presents the composer as a choir singer and recorder player trained
as biologist and philosopher and currently working as an educational
technologist. He is open to comments, questions, etc. and in his
detailed introduction is far from prescriptive. Articulation and
dynamics are left to the players, who must all conform to what is
eventually decided.
It must not be presented
to an audience as programme music, but there are two catastrophes in
its evolutionary unfolding, one like the meteor impact that
abolished the dinosaurs. In common time throughout its 266 bars at
an unvarying tempo, it plays for nine minutes, opening out from a
unison D with a few semi-flats and semi-sharps (fingerings
suggested) and occasionally some multiphonics, and gradually
occupying the whole normal range of the recorder, in which themes
develop and die out. Players are asked to sit in a straight line so
that themes may be identified by the listeners. Minimalist
techniques are employed to good effect in this intriguingly weird
composition.
Paul Closter? Clarke?
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