Le 28 juin 2017
de 11h00 à 11h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3204
Séance - Contemporary Musical Horizons (I)
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Damian Blättler
In the movement “De Stijl” from his oratorio De Materie, Louis Andriessen adapts Piet Mondrian’s 1927 Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue for musical use. Andriessen determines the total area of the painting and that of each of its eight quadrilaterals; arranging the quadrilaterals sequentially as if reading from left to right and from top to bottom, he converts the dimensions into time units at the ratio of one square centimetre to one crotchet. The five colours of the painting (including the black of the lines) are then mapped onto five timbral groups, each with associated musical material. This paper reads this act of translation not just as an ingenious large-scale structural constraint, but also as a study into the nature of musical time. The mapping of the Mondrian into music is by no means exact, and attending to the details of the painting’s “musicalization” – chief among them a web of motivic transformations and the reshuffling of and intercutting between blocks of material – can reveal multiple paths through the work. This paper details the mechanisms that make possible this diversity of temporal experience, and discusses how the movement – a piece about Mondrian and aesthetics within an oratorio about spirit and matter – participates in Andriessen’s broader fascination with time as explored in pieces such as De Tijd and De Snelheid.
