Aion: Contemporary Music for Bayan

Description

Let us listen to the stream of music and, pushed by the foundation of the past, be projected towards a future in the making. Music is the moment, a present with no depth: the Aion.

Bruno Mantovani: 8’20” Chrono
After years of procrastination and missed dates, in 2007 I eventually decided to compose a work for Pascal Contet. A neophyte in the field of the accordion, I wanted to face the instrument not from the viewpoint of organology, but rather by considering a musical problem that I regularly contemplated: the overlapping of intervals. I had tried this experience on the piano in the Study for alternating hands which I devoted to that instrument. I then wanted to see whether the accordion’s two keyboards could be even more conducive to such a rhythmic conception. Here, I obviously found the most suitable instrument for creating the illusion of a complex rhythmic polyphony. Each of the ten fingers plays a regular rhythm, and it is the overlapping of different patterns which creates the continuous texture. Written in a few days, this virtuoso and stereophonic work (since it is similar to a ping-pong game between the two keyboards) alludes, by its title, to a famous television series whose tension and suspense particularly inspired me! It was premiered at the Besançon festival by its dedicatee.

Danilo Comitini: Looper (2020)
Looper originates from a specific request to compose a piece focused on time. It consists of three distinct sections showing different time-stream visions. Each section follows its own criteria of internal directionality, emphasized by the combination of the time parameter with those pertaining to rhythm, register and harmony. The first section is a fast “rhythmic variation” on Tempo, leading to the “spatial” or “register” variation (second section). The second section is built on two parallel and strictly connected vectors running towards a progressive compression of registers and note duration. In opposition to the first two, the third and last section is characterized by an isochronous figuration with a harmonic function, which influences and directs the flow of the slow Perpetuum Mobile, always at the edge of silence.
Martin Lohse: Passing
“In my music, I try to encircle small musical moments and atmospheres, which can timeless progress and unfold. The collocation and collision of a “pure” and clear music with a disintegrated and multi-layered one is one of the main characteristics of my music. In the heart, music often emanates a harmonic and melodic reminiscence of past experiences in glints or longer periods. Combined with a floating sensation (accelerando, decelerando etc.), this creates a music with the organic form as one of its main foundations.”
This is a musical technique developed by Martin Lohse in 2009, whereby he combines polystylistic elements with a simple repeated sequence of chords, creating a music with both baroque and romantic elements, all in different tempos but with no or very few dissonances.

Sonia Bo: Time Toccata
“The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.
Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.” From “The Waves”, Virginia Woolf

Benjamin de Murashkin:
Music of an Organic Nature
Music of an Organic Nature is a piece wandering through several independent sections, seeking to weave them together into an overarching structure of one long crescendo and acceleration. Taking inspiration from the medieval to minimalism, these sections vary from the heavy passacaglia-like opening to the later soaring repetitions. Only as the piece finally subsides does a shadow of the opening passages come back into view under the collapsing figurations of the climax.

Stephen Montague: Aeolian Furies
The Furies, or Erinyes, as they were called in ancient Greek, were three fleet footed figures in Greek and Roman mythology who pursued and punished earthly evildoers. They were inexorable and unrelenting, but just. It seems that not even the Sun could transgress his orbit without The Furies overtaking and punishing him (or so it was claimed by Heraclitus).
It the same mythology Aeolus was King of the Four Winds and viceroy of the gods. The aeolian harp in which strings are gently played by the wind, and the aeolian scale which is A to A on the keyboard are derived from his name.
Aeolian Furies exploits the accordion’s unique hurricane mechanics in a whirlwind of aeolian scales played with punishing fury.