Robin de Raaff  - Time after Time (2006)						
Dedicated to Reinbert de Leeuw and the Schönberg Ensemble

In 2004 The Netherlandse Opera and The Holland Festival  performed the world premiere De Raaffs opera RAAFF, about the famous German tenor Anton Raaff who premiered Mozarts Idomeneo in 1781 in München at Karl Theodor’s Court. After having written RAAFF, a piece in which the multiplicity of musical ideas is of crucial importance to the development of the characters and the underlying dramatic development, De Raaff more and more felt the urge to write music where a single idea defines the whole outline, shape and impulse of the composition. This commission from the Donaueschingen Contemporary Music Festival became the object of that ideal.

The title Time after Time immediately reveals and time and repetition as very important elements. Instead of Time or Tempo being a factor that has been chosen intuitively, here Time has become a structural element, the very fabric of the work.

Time after Time is a setting of small chains, reccuring gestures that are clicked together to form larger chains, that then click together on a larger scale. The Tempo or Velocity around those reccuring gestures gradually speeds up, where as the absolute speed of those reccerences remain frozen in time.

This treatment is inspired by a technique that is very common in modern day cinematography. It is a musical equivalent of a lens-effect a subject can undergo by zooming from wide angle lens to a tele-lens while the subject’s size in the frame remains the same. The distance of the subject to the actual lens has to be constantly adjusted, causing the size of the subject in the frame to seemingly freeze while the surroundings very dynamically change, the effect is very impressive.

The musical dialogue starts when the friction builds up between those frozen gestures and gestures that actually do modulate in time with the general speed-up. And the musical climax starts at the moment the tempo starts slowing down again while those frozen gestures finally start speeding up against the general slow-down of the piece, in a poetic play of elements

From a completely artificial idea a very simple musical idea arose, with very clear rhetorics. Creating common ground in the vastly remote plains of extreme velocities, ever connected through the fluidity of time.

Robin de Raaff