putrefaction
Andrea La Rose
About this work:
putrefaction (2005), for four violins and four violas.
I know what you’re thinking: “Why did you choose such a disgusting title?” I have a firm belief in the serendipity that the thing I need will find me at the right moment, especially when it comes to titles. When this piece was an embryo, I was reading a book called, “Wild Fermentation,” by Sandor Katz. It’s a cookbook, but also a manifesto of sorts. The author has AIDS, and devotes several pages to ruminating about various implications of life and death, something which he has been forced to think about due to his circumstance, but also something in which the processes of fermentation are directly involved. I found the word “putrefaction” in this book, presented with a lack of disgust usually associated with the term. The idea of decay as a positive and necessary part of a process resonated with my ideas of consonance and dissonance as part of the necessities of this octet, and so “putrefaction” became the title.
During the process of finishing and rehearsing this piece, I was reading a book on modernism called, “All That Is Solid Melts into Air,” by Marshall Berman. One of the central conflicts of modern life, Berman suggests, is the modernist need for progress; the conflict being that in order to progress, in order to be able to constantly remake ourselves both physically and spiritually, we must destroy. This necessary part of the process is both tragic and heroic. These ideas have played themselves out, over and over in the past 150 years or so in music as well as other arts. I suspect musicians and music-lovers have even ended friendships over the use of consonance and dissonance and which better represents the tragi-comedy of modern life. I haven’t decided for myself which parts of my piece constitute the goodness of rotting (beer and cheese) or the horrors of rebuilding (eminent domain, gentrification). You may decide that for yourself.
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Looking back on this three years later, I see what other things were at play here that have developed into more ‘mature’ obsessions and concerns for me. I’ve become very interested in the perception of beat, meter, melody, and harmony, both by the performers and the audience. How do we decide who is presenting the main ideas and who is working for and against that?
For me, the composer is not someone who creates a world and controls everything that goes on in it; composing music is not about my will or even my vision being realized to perfection. Instead, I see my job as someone who provides a situation for people to realize their own power and work out their relationships to the other musicians, to the audience, and to themselves.
The situation is this: a song sandwiched between two slices of mayhem. I’ve taken away much of what performers tend to rely on in deciding their function in the music, so the performers have to each decide for themselves how to define their role in relation to what else is going on. The listeners are also making the same decisions, whether consciously or not, with effort or not.
Year composed: 2005
Duration: 00:40:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Other Combinations, 6-9 players
Instrumentation: 4 Violin, 4 Viola