Presented under the tagline: The Afterlife, an endless source of wonder, mystery, inspiration, curiosity, fear… since the beginning of time.
"Based upon a text by Romanian poet Ioana Vintilă, Odă cesiului și celor de pe urmă (Ode to caesium and those from the beyond), the performance explores the many facets of death, viewed as more than just the end but a new beginning, a way to commune with our ancestors, gain infinite knowledge and peace through multiple means of artistic expression.
The composition lies at a crossroads of experimental music, traditional composition techniques and improvisation, where the instruments, as well as the instrumentalists, push real and imagined boundaries in search of the deeper meaning contained in the source material.
Despite the perceived morbidity of the subject matter, the performance ultimately serves as a celebration of life and its infinite beauty." [excerpt from the performance notes]
The choice of this specific poem was not accidental, but came on the back of Ioana releasing her poetry volume titled Buncărul de origami (Origami bunker) in 2022. Romanian poet born in 1997 in Sibiu; a representative of the new wave of distinguished authors, Ioana has been awarded numerous international awards, her debut volume, Păsări în furtuna de nisip (Birds in a sandstorm) enjoying national and international acclaim.
I had always been fascinated with her poetry due to its descriptive nature and the intense emotional response that I got from reading her works. When I came across Ode to caesium and those from the beyond, I was profoundly moved and could already hear the music as it interlaced with the beautiful words.
In this composition, I many diverse means in order to include the text in the musical discourse which I used as a source of inspiration both from a linguistic point of view (basing structure, rhythm, flow/groove, meter and stylistic choices on a syntactical analysis of the poem) and also deriving meaning, emotion and expression from it. As such, the poem dictated the six-part structure of the piece, the reoccurrence of obsessive patterns and the overall atmosphere present in each individual section, viewed as interviews with the different characters identified throughout the text. I have also integrated the text in the music for its lyrical and phonesthetic qualities, certain words and phrases generating extremely evocative sounds and rhythmic patterns.
In my interpretation of the poem, I viewed each different stanza as a dialogue with a specific character as they ponder their own death and their emotional response to it, be it a sense of peace, relief at the end of a long suffering or fury in the face of perceived injustice, sentiments which are captured in the dedicated section through the use of distinctive stylistic elements. Thus, for example, the first section, which invokes, in the poem, a funeral ritual led by a shaman as viewed through the eyes of a layman, is musically translated through the use of a repeating rhythmical pattern that grows in intensity until it disintegrates following its explosive climax, while the section that talks of nuns walking through a field of beautiful flowers in the afterlife is accompanied by serene whole tone passages in the style of Debussy.
Initially, the poem was the source material for a solo flute experiment where I intended to use a prepared piano as a resonance chamber in the search of acoustically obtaining the types of effects that I would usually use electronic processing for. However, after the solo performance, I felt that the music needed an extra voice/dimension in order to fully make the text justice and rewrote it for flute, voice, prepared piano and visuals.
In this second iteration, I relied on flute, voice and prepared piano to generate soundscapes, textures and harmonic/rhythmic gestures that were inspired by the text but also "spoke" for themselves as an equal dialogue partner. The gloomy atmosphere speaks of a floating consciousness beyond the here and the now, anchored in instinctive rhythmical patterns and interrupted by moments of true harmonic and melodic clarity, while the typing effect predominant in the video projection keeps the performance grounded in the present, giving the illusion of the story being written as it unfolds.
