Sunday, March 13, 2011
Art Essay 2: Eric Whitacre "Cloudburst"
This choice of art was inspired by the Catawba Singers tour over spring break. We went to Chicago and performed the concert version of Eric Whitacre’s “Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings” which was an incredible experience. Whitacre’s music has a very unique style that is incredibly powerful and captivating, due in large part to its originality. His style is very contemporary and his pieces have an abundance of cluster chords. He also typically writes for at least 8 voice parts, ranging up to 18 parts in one piece. “Cloudburst” is a signature Whitacre piece with many voice parts, unusual chord progression, and use of percussion and spoken word. The piece is incredibly complex, and is set to an adaptation of the spanish poem “El Cántaro Roto” by Octavio Paz. The first a cappella section sets the tone for the piece and it includes a section where the choir has sustained notes with text randomly spoken by each member of the choir. The words are not meant to have a rhythm and they have a disorienting and haunting effect on the audience. This technique is atypical of most choral music, which is meant to be precise and clean. Here, the listener has a hard time understanding the words of the choir, but this cacophony mirrors the name of the piece. It begins the theme of a rainstorm which continues later in the work. The chord after the repeated words end is made even more powerful because of the sudden clarity of sound. These chords carry into the next choral section which has lots of suspended chords and minor qualities, some of my favorite musical elements. The all male section and baritone solo sound almost like ancient chant, continuing the haunting quality of the piece and Whitacre continues to build beautiful tension, portraying the feeling in the air before a thunderstorm. He then repeats the section of repeated words in the female voices while another reads spoken lyrics over the choir. The male voices have a similar chant-like line underneath all of this. The music tells a story and draws in the listener, giving an ominous feeling and anticipation. In the next section, the choir builds chords from the bottom, mimicking the first drops of rain and then building to constant chord progressions which sound to me like the first violent sheets of rain that fall. The storm becomes peaceful again and handbells begin. More and more instruments are added, imitating the sounds of rain and distant thunder, and the choir begins to snap and clap their hands creating a sound like rain. Singing over this percussion, they create a haunting melody and the minor tensions are finally relieved in a major chord progression. As the storm tapers off, Whitacre again uses clustered chords and repeated melodies to keep the mystical element of the rainstorm. His incredible talent for composition creates a believable rainstorm and a story which the audience can relate to. The tension in the air before a thunderstorm is one of my favorite feelings and he managed to capture that feeling in his music. All of Whitacre’s work is beautiful and captivating, but this piece in particular amazes me. His ability to capture a natural phenomenon in a musical composition is astounding, and every time I listen to this piece I hear more and more elements of his work. The text is also incredibly beautiful and speaks of reawakening the earth and dreaming of a lost time where nature and man were in balance.
Spanish Lyrics:
La lluvia
ojos de agua de sombra,
ojos de agua de pozo,
ojos de agua de sueño.
Soles azules, verdes remolinos
picos de luz que abren astros
como granadas.
Dime, tierra quemada, no hay agua?
Hay sólo sangre sólo hay polvo,
sólo pisadasde pies desnudos sobre la espina?
La lluvia despierta
Hay que dormir con los ojos abiertos,
Hay que sonar con las manos
Soñemos sueños activos de rio
Buscando su cause, sueños de sol soñando sus mundos
hay que soñar en voz alta,
hay que cantar
hasta que el canto eche
raíces, tronco, ramas,
hay que desenterrar la palabra perdida
recordar que dicen sangre, la marea,
la tierra y el cuerpo,
volver al punto de partida.
English Translation:
The rain ...
Eyes of shadow-water
eyes of well-water
eyes of dream-water.
Blue suns, green whirlwinds,
pecks of light that open
pomegranate stars.
But tell me, burnt earth,
is there no water?
Only blood, only dust,
only naked footsteps on the thorns?
The rain awakens ...
We must sleep with open eyes,
We must dream with our hands
we must dream dreams of active rivers
Searching for their cause
Dreams of the sun dreaming of its worlds
we must dream aloud,
we must sing till the song
casts roots,
trunks, branches, birds, stars,
we must unearth the lost word,
and remember
what the blood, the tides,
the earth, and the body say,
and return to the point of departure
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Ok, a distillation of my lost comment:
ReplyDeleteI don't have the musical vocabulary to hear (let alone evaluate) the qualities you articulate, so I defer to your better trained ear.
But... I didn't have the same reaction to the spoken lines, which I found distracting (and maybe a tad overblown). I was also skeptical about the section of the performance where the choir claps and snaps to convey thunderclaps and rain. I read your description before I actually heard this part of the performance, though, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked when I actually heard it. The onomatopoeia is pretty uncanny. I generally regard this sort of sound production to be "gimmicky" but not this time. (I was, however, distracted by all the rustling as they prepared to enact this part of the performance; I don't like fidgety choirs. Gospel choir are the exception, of course.)
Lastly, what struck me most was the way this piece uses a fundaementally sacred form (choral music) for the purposes of a story about nature, especially a nature where the divine is not present. I suppose a great deal of choral music does that now, but it still strikes me as an innovative use of the form.