Hybrid
Ensemble
4 Violin I
4 Violin II
2 Viola
2 Violoncelli
1 Double Bass
Program note
Hybrid is based on 15 short movements – tests written for 15 solo strings in 2005, which were never used. Now in 2013, the old material was put together and then placed in a new and larger context, from shorter etudes to a complete work. The actual score is for 13 solo strings, aiming for the Cuidad de Orihuela Orchestra in Orihuela, Spain.
The original fragments are still consequently isolated within each movement, but now the 15 movements are arranged into one single movement, containing 22 rehearsal letters (A-V). It is however important to mark out that I have tried to keep the original 15 scores as intact as possible regarding most parameters, mainly to overcome and ignore my wishes to revise and improve? an eight-year-old work of mine. There are naturally some changes, but all were very carefully taken care of, due to the most important fundament of the work, namely musical ideas that never are fulfilled, they collapse over and over again.
Therefore, as a listener, you will probably recognise a familiar environment, but this sense of musical rendezvous or stability collapses without any hope for reconciliation or salvation. The music does not proceed, it does not unfold or evolve; the creative process of building melodic lines and the constructive richness of seeking variation are absent, but it is eventually through this negation the music gets its richness.
Background
When reading about Orihuela, the larger parts of the texts pointed out the significant cultural heritage of the area, the several changes of religion through history, and the poet Miguel Hernández. In comparison to Lorca and Neruda, Hernández is internationally rather unknown. But when reading about him I realised that there were several points of contact between my hybrid music and his hybrid life and poetry: In his life, he remained torn between two worlds; between his childhood’s Arcadian countryside and the artificial, decadent city as a grown-up man. In his poetry, you can find traces of both “simple” popular art and so-called sophisticated art, where his style developed from a form for traditionalism to a greater independence of form and imagery, i.e. modernistic traits.
Explanation
Being both a composer and a music critic and editor, my conclusion of today’s situation in contemporary music is that one frequently discussed topic is based on a postmodern aesthetic point of view concerning how you as a composer of today can reach a personal and artistically well grounded synthesis between construction and emotion.
On one side we have systematized compositional methods that are based on solely musical parameters, where the actual composers work out from an absolute status quo and the musical material derive from strict serial systems. The common artistic standpoints for these processes are partly the aversion towards romanticism and sentimentality, and partly a strong wish to problematize intuition, which they claim is bound to doubtful notions of tradition and non-questioned habits.
On the other hand, there seems to be a longing for a romantic and expressionistic idiom. This can partly be understood as a reaction on the absolute music of modernism and its massive regulatory system of prohibitions and dictations. These postmodern, neoromantics, antimodernist composers feel a strong urge to revive and set free their inner artistic power, based on intuition and feelings, where they hope to find and open up the gates of imagination and inner power. The music is according to these composers, already there and should therefore be able to seek itself and find its form through inherited pictures and scents.
My artistic fundament is closely related to this topic: Is it possible to combine these two artistic incitements and regard as artistically equal? Can I transform this notion of polarisation between the two directions into a naturally regarded hybrid that is capable to fulfil my artistic wishes and where this combination can work as a prolongation of life itself?
Hy•brid (hai brid)
n.
1. the offspring of two animals or plants of different breeds, varieties, or species, esp. as produced through human manipulation for specific genetic characteristics.
2. a person produced by the interaction or crossbreeding of two unlike cultures, traditions, etc.
3. anything derived from unlike sources, or composed of disparate or incongruous elements; composite.
4. a word composed of elements originally drawn from different languages, as television, whose components come from Greek and Latin.
adj.
5. bred from two distinct races, breeds, varieties, or species.
6. composite; formed or composed of heterogeneous elements.
Miscellaneous
Duration: 12 min.
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