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Clarinet
Concerto
(2005-06)
Opgedragen aan Lorraine Vaillancourt, Simon Aldrich
en Nouvel Ensemble Modern
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De
concertvorm is een instrumentaal concept dat als een
rode draad door het oeuvre van De Raaff heen loopt.
Sterker nog, er is zelfs al een werk waarin de klarinet
als solist optreedt: Dubbelconcert voor klarinet,
basklarinet en orkest, geschreven in opdracht van
de 'Matinée op de vrije Zaterdag' in 1997.
De Raaff’s Dubbelconcert kan worden
beschouwd als een voorloper van en als een vooruitwijzing
naar dit Klarinetconcert. Evenzo als een nog te schrijven
Basklarinetconcert. Wat de voorliefde van de componist
voor de (bas)klarinet overduidelijk weergeeft.
In het vijfdelige Klarinetconcert, zien we
net als in het Dubbelconcert, een manifestatie
van verschillende krachten en krachtmetingen. De solist
staat tegenover het orkest als in een strijd van het
individu tegen de massa, een geliefd onderwerp van
De Raaff. Het muzikale materiaal wordt in verschillende
dimensies tegenover elkaar geplaatst en wel zodanig
dat er een ‘’visuele diepte’’
ontstaat. Het idee is een muzikaal eerbetoon aan de
allervroegste kubistische uitingen van schilders als
Robert Delaunay en Pablo Picasso.
In de eerste twee delen van het Klarinetconcert,
eerst snel en daarna langzaam, zien we een vervlechting
van gelijkwaardige krachten. Deze lijken soms onafhankelijk
van elkaar te bestaan in dezelfde ruimte. Als twee
naburige hemellichamen in een universum, die tegelijkertijd
samen de muzikale ruimte definiëren.
Vanaf het derde deel, getiteld Cadenza, zien
we dat de schaduwklarinet, de klarinet in het orkest,
zich langzaam losweekt van het orkest om zich bij
zijn gelijke te voegen, de soloklarinet. Als evenwaardige
krachten sluiten de twee klarinetten, bijgestaan door
de marimba, deze Cadenza af in een obsessief
en drammerig Duo in het donkere 'Chalumeau'-register
van het instrument. Vanaf dit punt, in het vierde
deel, neemt het orkest de krachtenbundeling over en
stuwt deze nieuwe krachten verder dan de klarinetten
ooit zouden kunnen doen.
Het vijfde deel is een Coda waarin de soloklarinet
een poëtisch duo vormt met de 'schaduw'-klarinet
van het orkest, tegenover een tot stilstand gekomen
harmonische progressie, een gravitatie naar de diepste
klanken van het orkest. Deze zuigkracht vanuit de
diepte, vooruit gegaan door de klarinetten, is als
een zwart gat dat het stuk wegzuigt in het luchtledige. |
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Der
Einsame im Herbst for
large ensemble
Program note for the American premiere in the Alice
Tully Hall of Lincoln Center New York, on the 10th
of December 2002
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In
1998 the Gergjev Festival, a festival programmed
by and around the conductor Valery Gergjev, commissioned
the Dutch composer Robin de Raaff to write a piece
based on the theme of the festival that year, 'tragic
love’. Arnold Schönberg was the main
present and absent in the program. He was to be
the subject of De Raaff's composition. Schönberg
had survived his artistic sons Alban Berg and Anton
Webern, and as a result lost the most important
younger representatives of his twelftone technique.
The title Der Einsame im Herbst (The lonely
one in Autumn), named after the second part of Gustav
Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, captures
in a striking way the tragedy of a men left alone
in the autumn of his life.
The Kammerkonzert by Berg, written for
Schönberg's fiftieth birthday, starts with
the initials of Schönberg, Webern and Berg
as three separate musical motifs simply played next
to each other in the first three opening measures.
That was to become the entrance to his composition
in which De Raaff has blown up each of these initials
into complete and separate movements, which are
linked to each other. Creating a piece of 16 minutes
out of the three opening measures of Berg's
Kammerkonzert.
The
first part of Der Einsame im Herbst is
based on the Schönberg 8-tone motif, which
is used in a fast way in the lower register of the
ensemble and in a very slow way, as a long stretched
melody, in the higher register of the ensemble.
But mostly emphasizing the darker and deeper side
of the ensemble.
The
second part is based on the initials of Berg. This
4-note motif has been verticalised into a chord.
From the background, constantly in the middle register,
these four voiced harmonies are slowly surfacing,
accelerating and behaving more and more like a real
choral. Towards the very end it puts its surrounding
to the background, ultimately taking over completely.
Just as Berg used the choral 'Es ist genug’
(It is enough, Lord) of J.S. Bach in the 2nd movement
of his Violin Concerto as a tribute to
Bach, De Raaff creates a choral based on the Berg
motif as a tribute to Berg.
The
third part is based on the smallest of the three
motifs, a three tone motif based on Webern, whose
pieces are well known for their sparse textures
and durations.
This movement is the thinnest and shortest movement.
Thin, in terms of the emphasis on the lucid higher
register, as well as the use of very thin, soft
and slow staccato motifs.
Dramatically
seen the piece starts thick, dark and heavy and
over the course of the three movements, it vanishes
into thin air as a metaphor for life and death.
In an abstract sense the composition is about, the
difference between forground and background and
the exchange of these dimensions. Dutch writer Harry
Mulisch who is well known for his typical use of
structure in his novels, wrote `De elementen' (The
elements), in which a comparable situation appears
that inspired De Raaff for the structure of the
2nd movement of Der Einsame im Herbst.
In Mulisch's book every chapter has an element as
a title. In the beginning seemingly unimportant,
but little by little the chapters become shorter
and the title more important. Accelerating towards
the end the titles have become an inevitable catastrofic
force.
Amsterdam, October 2002
—Robin de Raaff
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Entangled
Tales
(2007)
This is the world premiere performance of Entangled
Tales, which was commissioned for the Boston
Symphony Orchestra with financial support from the
Fund for the Creation of New Music, The Netherlands
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Robin
de Raaff’s new Entangled Tales for
orchestra, completed earlier this summer, was commissioned
as part of the initiative NL: A Season of Dutch Arts
in the Berkshires, a season-long celebration of the
cultural riches of the Netherlands. Arts organizations
throughout the county, including the dance venue Jacob’s
Pillow, visual art at the Clark Institute, visual
art, theater, and music at MASS MoCA, and six programs
at Tanglewood: the two Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts
led by Edo de Waart this weekend, last week’s
two performances by the Netherlands Bach Society,
and two Ozawa Hall concerts—an all-Schubert
program and an all-Beethoven program—by the
Netherlands-based period-instrument ensemble Orchestra
of the Age of Englightenment, on August 21 and 22
at 8:30 p.m.
As might be understood from the title of the piece,
Robin de Raaff wrote his piece specifically for Tanglewood.
The composer credits his experience here as the Senior
Composition Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center
in 2000 as an important stage in his career, and he
also remembers fondly the time he spent working and
attending concerts here. His sparkling and uniquely
constructed Enneas Domein was performed at that summer’s
Festival of Contemporary Music. In 2001 he returned
to Tanglewood as the recipient of the TMC’s
Paul Jacobs commission to attend the premiere of the
result of that commission, his Piano Concerto,
performed by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra
led by Ludovic Morlot (then a TMC Fellow, now in the
last month of his two-year tenure as assistant conductor
of the BSO), and TMC Fellow Ralph van Raat as piano
soloist.
Already before his Tanglewood sojourns, de Raaff was
an acclaimed composer in his native country, having
had performances by some of the best-known Dutch ensembles
and instrumentalists, including the ASKO Ensemble,
Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra, and the Nieuw
Ensemble, which premiered his Flute Concerto
under Ed Spanjaard and flute virtuoso Harrie Starreveld
in 1997. De Raaff had attended Amsterdam’s Sweelinck
Conservatory, working with composers Greet van Keulen
and Theo Loevendie. After meeting and working with
George Benjamin at Tanglewood in 2000 (Benjamin was
a composer in residence and Festival of Contemporary
Music director that summer), he went on to study further
with Benjamin in at the Royal College of Music. Since
then, his career has blossomed further, perhaps most
notably with the production of his chamber opera RAAFF,
which was commissioned by the Netherlands Opera and
co-produced with the Holland Festival and premiered
in June 2004. (The title RAAFF refers to
the opera’s main character Anton Raaff, the
tenor for whom Mozart wrote the title role of Idomeneo
and to whom Robin de Raaff is distantly related.)
The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra has performed his
Concerto for Orchestra (originally written
for The Hague’s Residentie Orchestra) and commissioned
and premiered his Unisono. Recent major premieres
include his Clarinet Concerto, first performed
by Le Nouvel Ensemble Modern in March 2006, and his
ensemble piece Time After Time, introduced
by the Schönberg Ensemble at the Donaueschingen
Festival in October 2006. His Piano Concerto,
the Tanglewood commission, has had many performances
since its premiere here in 2001.
De Raaff was approached about writing a new work for
premiere at the Tanglewood festival about two years
ago. This will be the first time he has collaborated
with his countryman, conductor Edo de Waart, who is
guest conductor of the BSO in two programs this weekend.
About his current piece, de Raaff writes, “A
newly commissioned work always starts from an utter
and complete void. But as I sketch, more and more
the important material separates itself from the lesser
material, and in the end I always seem to end up with
the ‘proper’ material that enables me
to write an entire work, for whatever length; but
that is a long journey.” When asked about whether
the experience of working on his large-scale opera
had changed his music, he replied,
" The oeuvre of a composer always splits itself
into before and after the first opera…. My Piano
Concerto, for instance, is a very constructivist
piece—the length of the movements all correspond
to a certain ratio, as do the rhythmic motifs, without
losing the sense of real musical timing…and
therefore everything is conceived from a sort of “perfect”
plan…. While writing my opera I felt that the
timing, from moment to moment, needed to be free,
while the overall timing of the entire opera was carefully
planned. After my opera I really let go of the constructivist
approach to structure and the music that flows through
it, and found that I had actually made a big step
forwards. This piece Entangled Tales and
many other newer pieces are much more free again.
I use the same musical grammar as in the Piano
Concerto and other earlier, pre-RAAFF
works, but now more freely."
One of the key words in the composer’s comments
is “flows”—the impelling motion
of most of de Raaff’s work is one of its most
audible characteristics, along with deft and scintillating
orchestration reminiscent of Strauss or Debussy or,
more currently, Boulez and George Benjamin. In Entangled
Tales the composer employs a large orchestra
with a full complement of percussion plus harp. Alto
flute adds a touch of exoticism to the woodwind section.
Instruments are grouped together for complex collections
of musical gestures, which are themselves combined
to form what might be thought of as multilayered “supermotifs,”
as opposed to a simpler melodic or harmonic theme-group.
Several of these dynamic gestures are used to form
a fluid mosaic of rhythms, brief melodies, and timbres
in an ever-changing texture, enhanced further by intricate
attention to dynamics and articulation (accents, muting,
tremolando, strings “col legno” or played
with the wood of the bow, and so forth throughout
the orchestra). In the largest sense, the experience
is ebb and flow of musical density and intensity,
from active hyperactive tutti orchestra to transparent,
chamber-music like passages and back again, with all
entangled details sparkling. |
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Vioolconcert
(2006-2008)
(opdrachtwerk ZaterdagMatinee – eerste
uitvoering)
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Het
woord concert roept vanzelfsprekend automatisch
associaties op met de klassiek-romantische traditie.
Echter als er een compositie is die niet aan het
klassieke stramien van weleer beantwoordt is het
wel De Raaffs Vioolconcert. Evenmin is
zulks het geval bij het Vioolconcert (1935)
van Alban Berg, die – evenals De Raaff - de
verworvenheden van de traditie op een buitengewoon
eigenzinnige manier hanteerde.
De wens een vioolconcert te schrijven, hield De
Raaff al sinds zijn zestiende bezig. Niet alleen
een opvallende zin voor proporties verraadt De Raaffs
affiniteit met Berg – laatstgenoemde was eenvoudigweg
geobsedeerd door getallen – maar vooral ook
hoe deze getallen resulteerden in een buitengewoon
lyrische en expressieve klanktaal. In Bergs Vioolconcert
is bekende Bachkooral – ongeveer halverwege
het tweede deel, dus op ruim driekwart van de lengte
– een van de meest in het oog springende elementen.
De Raaff was aanvankelijk van zins net als Berg
een tweedelig concert te concipiëren, maar
het werd uiteindelijk een eendelig werk. Opmerkelijk
is dat ook De Raaff een koraalachtig gegeven de
revue laat passeren. Hij brengt dat in tegenstelling
tot Bergs in diens Vioolconcert niet aan het slot,
maar vlak na de aanhef, zodat men van een spiegeling
van het oude voorbeeld zou kunnen spreken. Anders
dan bij Berg betreft het geen citaat, maar een eigen
creatie.
De Raaffs werk begint met een orkestraal uiwaaierend
fragment dat slechts aan de strijkers en twee klarinetten
is toevertrouwd. Deze groep herhaalt telkens een
melodische frase die onmiddellijk wordt ‘bevroren’
in een harmonisch moment. Uit die harmonische laag
komt geleidelijk de stem van de viool tevoorschijn,
terwijl de klank van het orkest uitdooft. Uit de
dan ontstane tweestemmigheid ontvouwt zich het koraalgegeven.
De Raaffs melodische frase tendeert naar een eindpunt,
maar het harmonische centrum blijft goeddeels in
het ongewisse, ook al is dat niet afwezig. Staat
in Bergs Vioolconcert het kwint-interval
in het middelpunt (het werk begint met de welbekende
kwintenstapeling), bij De Raaff is dat de grote
sext, die – om het even wat er zich in het
betoog ook afspeelt – bij de luisteraar de
indruk van een verwijd tonale structuur bewerkstelligt.
Deze sext is de uitkomst van drie gestapelde kwinten
(G-D-A-E); en zij komt overeen met de laagste en
de hoogste losse snaren van de viool (de tonen G
en E).
Als
orkest vermomde viool
Een ander element van belang is dat van de ‘geografie
van de uitvoering’. De eerste en tweede violen
staan in een horizontale rij vooraan opgesteld en
vormen een soort ripieno-ensemble van solisten.
Deze verwerken de motieven op een hoketus-achtige
manier. In diepste wezen suggereren zij daarmee
een ruimtelijke uitvergroting van het solo-instrument.
Voorts zijn de snaren van de grotendeels op open
snaren spelende tweede violen (N.B.: het opereren
met open snaren geldt voor de hele strijkersectie
tijdens de belangrijke eb- en vloedmomenten) een
kleine secunde lager gestemd, waardoor de impressie
van een ‘als orkest vermomde viool’
eens te meer wordt versterkt. Dit kan mede worden
opgevat als een hommage aan Jaap van Zweden, aan
wie deze compositie is opgedragen (behalve voor
hem werd het stuk ook voor Tasmin Little geschreven).
De rol van de strijkers – met inbegrip van
instrumenten als piano en harp die, samen met het
strijkorkest, het arsenaal van snaarinstrumenten
compleet maken – is veelal geïsoleerd
van die van de rest van het orkest, waarin met name
de blazers bepaalde melodische wendingen versterken.
Doordat de strijkers in belangrijke mate alleen
op open snaren spelen, ontstaat een zeer boventoonrijke
sonoriteit. In relatie met het gangbare toonarsenaal
levert dat een verbeeldingrijk contrast op tussen
het aardse en het bovenaardse.
Engelenzang
Vervolgens zij vermeld dat De Raaffs Vioolconcert,
evenals dat van Berg, een instrumentaal requiem
is. ‘Dem Andenken eines Engels’ staat
als motto boven Bergs partituur, en De Raaff nam
dat opschrift in zijn partituur over. Toen hij ongeveer
halverwege het scheppingsproces gevorderd was, ontving
hij het bericht dat een goede vriend was overleden,
die een begenadigd saxofonist was geweest. Als een
klinkende hommage laat de saxofoon dan ook tegen
het einde van het concert van zich horen.
Wie ‘engel’ zegt, zegt ‘aura’.
En dat laatste, het bereiken van een equivalent
van een aura in klank, wordt gerealiseerd doordat
De Raaff de boventonen – de losse snaren zijn
rijk aan zulke boventonen – een belangrijke
rol toebedeelt. Bovendien hanteert hij subtiele
dynamische schakeringen (crescendi/decrescendi)
binnen de afzonderlijke en ‘stilstaande’
tonen van de solist. De Raaff werd hiertoe naar
eigen zeggen geïnspireerd door het gregoriaans.
Deze aloude muziekvorm klinkt doorgaans in grote
kerken met een immense akoestiek. In die akoestiek
konden de boventonen een bijna eigen leven leiden
en ontstond een intrigerend contrapunt met de gefixeerde
toonhoogtes. In het spel van de boventonen openbaarde
zich, meende men, het zingen der engelen.
—Maarten Brandt
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Piano
Concerto
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Dutch
composer Robin de Raaff (b.1968), a Tanglewood Composition
Fellow in the summer of 2000, won that year’s
prestigious Jacobs Commission, the fulfillment of
which resulted in the initial three movements of
the Piano Concerto, which received its
world premiere in the summer of 2001 at Tanglewood.
It received critical acclaim from:
-Paul Griffiths in the New York Times: “This
was where the echoes of Mr. Ligeti's music came
in […] But Mr. de Raaff has his own way of
weaving together allusions to things as disparate
as medieval music (again) and Varèse, and
his own poetry.”
-Richard Dyer in The Boston Globe: “The Piano
Concerto is sophisticated in structure and
workmanship, and the slow central section rises
to eloquence.”
The performance tonight will be the World Premiere
of the Piano Concerto in its complete form,
with two added new movements that were completed
last summer.
Writing a piano concerto, or a concerto in general,
poses a lot of questions concerning balance between
the soloist and the other instruments. “I
immediately chose to keep the ensemble to a minimum,
to be able to emphasize and explore the more subtle
character of the piano”, as done so explicitly
in the slow, second movement of this concerto. The
first three movements form one arch, one bow, of
which the three movements are an uninterrupted part,
as do the last two seperate movements. There is
a break in between the 3rd and the 4th movement,
ultimately forming two larger movements with smaller
inner movements.
The idea of the piece is very much a structural
one inspired by the Violin Concerto of
Stravinsky. In Stravinsky’s concerto every
movement starts from the same musical gesture from
which rather different music evolves. In De Raaff's
Piano Concerto all five movements start
from the same musical situation, the interval the
fifth (d1–a1) in the middle register. This
opening gesture, which forms a focal point from
which musical environments both derive and arrive,
thus creating completely different musical worlds
that are constructively different yet linked together
by a common root and common material. The relation
between the movements is always 1:2, creating the
fast, initial movements (quarter = 100) of exactly
five minutes, then the slow 2nd movements (quarter
= 66) of exactly 2 1/2 minutes and then a fast movement
again of exactly 5 minutes, derived from the ratio
2:1:2, creating a Fast-Slow-Fast total movement.
The last two movements have the same relationships
in tempo, duration (1:2) and character.
This Piano Concerto is dedicated to De
Raaff’s former teacher George Benjamin.
—Robin
de Raaff, Amsterdam, 28th of October 2002
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Time
after Time
(2006)
Dedicated to Reinbert de Leeuw and the Schönberg
Ensemble
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program notes |
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In
2004 The Netherlandse Opera and The Holland Festival
performed the world premiere De Raaff's opera RAAFF,
about the famous German tenor Anton Raaff who premiered
Mozart's 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 |
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Chalumeau
for
clarinet and piano
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program notes |
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Robin
de Raaff, whose father introduced him to the piano,
received his musical education at the Sweelinck
Conservatory in Amsterdam, where he studied with
Geert van Keulen and Theo Loevendie. He participated
in a Pierre Boulez master class and studied with
Brian Ferneyhough at the Internationale Ferienkurse
für Neue Musik in Darmstadt in 1996. In England,
at the Royal College of Music, he studied with George
Benjamin, who invited him to Tanglewood as a senior
fellow. The Tanglewood Music Center commissioned
him to write a piano concerto, which was premiered
there. At present, de Raaff is working on a large-scale
symphonic work for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
to be premiered in 2004. Since 2001, De Raaff has
taught composition and instrumentation at the Rotterdam
Academy of Music. In collaboration with Pierre Audi,
artistic director of De Nederlandse Opera, De Raaff
is developing an opera, Raaff, scheduled
to have its premiere with the Netherlands Opera
and the Holland Festival on June 26, 2004. The subject
of the opera is Anton Raaff, the tenor who sang
the title role in Mozart’s Idomeneo in 1781.
De
Raaff began developing his own methods of organizing
musical structures, which led to his style of musical
composition, in which he subjects various parameters
to numerical relationships. “I really feel
a need to let my intuition be guided by numbers,”
he says, “because it forces me to investigate
areas I’m not familiar with.”
De
Raaff has received numerous awards, including the
KNTV Composition Prize, the first prize at the International
Competition for Composers of Chamber Music, the
Young European Composers Award in Leipzig, and the
AG Kunst Prijs.
De
Raaff feels that his style has progressively become
more concentrated and focused. “My first pieces
were influenced by serialism, mainly that of Boulez.
I was very much taken by that kind of complexity;
you can lose yourself in it totally. But you take
the risk that afterwards no one remembers a single
note. In order to truly absorb serial music, every
listener should ideally have perfect pitch. That’s
why I now strive more for unambiguousness. What
I write is still complex, but the gestures are more
distinct and understandable. The notes themselves
have more meaning—on the one hand because
I devote more attention to their melodic aspect,
and on the other hand [because I create] more points
of repose that make the moments of motion more effective.”
His
Chalumeau for clarinet and piano, dedicated
to both Céleste Zewald and Jaap Kooi and
commissioned by the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, receives
its US premiere in tonight’s concert. De Raaff
has explained that the inspiration for the title
Chalumeau comes from a specific register in
the clarinet, which is at the bottom and is lower
and darker than the other clarinet registers. It
is also the name for a shepherd’s flute, an
instrument akin to the recorder. The dark color,
usually in the lowest register of the piano and
reappearing in different settings throughout, is
a constant factor in the piece. De Raaff uses the
coloration in what he calls “structural counterpoint
with the development of a bell-like sound in the
upper, middle, and lower registers of the piano
pitted against the low, slow chalumeau clarinet
register.” This bell-like sound ultimately
takes over at the end of the piece.
—Note by Susan Halpern
www.halpernprogramnotes.com
—Copyright © 2003 by The Carnegie Hall
Corporation
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Piano
Trio (1996/rev.
2001)
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It
is a real challenge for a composer to write for
one of the more standard and traditional historic
ensembles. Like for instance the string quartet,
woodwind quintet, string trio, and of course the
piano trio. But somehow that challenge seems to
appeal to Robin de Raaff since he has written a
string quartet called Athomus, a woodwind
quintet called Aerea as well as a Piano
Trio.
But especially this last medium, the Piano Trio,
seems to perfectly suite the musical language that
De Raaff has developed in his more recent work.
One element, which is maybe the most outspoken one
in De Raaff’s music, is the aspect of layering
different rhythmical processes. The Piano Trio
combines perhaps the most contrasting, almost opposing,
sound characteristics in one ensemble. The sound
of the ever decaying piano as opposed to the string
instruments that, with their bowing technique can
do the exact opposite, being crescendo.
This
contrast, is the starting point for De Raaff’s
urge to layer seemingly independent musical structures
as completely separate entities. But also as more
unified entities by juxtaposition, which is a direct
influence from the music of the Renaissance where
rhythmical units are often juxtaposed in different
speeds, giving a result that fascinates Robin de
Raaff. Like in Renaissance music, the rhythms that
De Raaff uses to control and determine are often
simple rhythmical ratios that construct both the
macrostructure and the microstructure, and all scales
in between those extremes.
But the result is not an abstract musical language,
on the contrary, his music seems to have a very
clear dramatic direction. Starting with a cello
solo, the introduction consists only of the two
string instruments, where the piano comes in as
a real intruder. But as the piece unfolds, we see
the struggle of the instruments to become unified,
falling apart again in the very end, leaving us
only with the two string instruments revealing a
chorale that has been trying to resurface ever since
the piece started.
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