Komponistenportrait Dubravko Detoni, Kroatien

Lüneburg, 20.10.2011, 19 Uhr

musica detoniana

Helmut W. Erdmann, flutes & live-elecronics
Dubravko Detoni, keyboards

Programme:
Dubravko Detoni:

From-To
Monos III
Phonomorphia 2
Monos IV
Phonomorphia 1
Graphie I
Banalia
White Music
Black Music
Fable

Croatian composer, pianist and writer Dubravko Detoni (1937) graduated in the piano (Svetislav Stan?i?) and composition (Stjepan Šulek) from the Zagreb Academy of  Music, and continued with further studies in Siena (Alfred Cortot, Guido Agosti), Warsaw (Witold Lutos?awski, Gra?yna Bacewicz, the Experimental Studio of  Polish Radio), Darmstadt (György Ligeti and Karlheinz Stockhausen), and in Paris (John Cage). His oeuvre includes 132 orchestral, chamber, soloist, vocal, and electronic works, a number of multimedia projects and experiments, ten books of poetry, fiction and essays, series of  radio and television programmes, as well as numerous commentaries on concert and sound recordings. He has received many awards in his homeland and abroad. His works have been performed on all continents and at the most important international music festivals, they have been published in Croatia and abroad and released on 51 recordings. He is founder and artistic leader (from 1970) of Ensemble for contemporary music ACEZANTEZ with which he has given guest performances in most European countries, as well in some parts of America and Asia. The author writes his music drawing on both classical instruments and electronic music devices, whereas his efforts to enrich the sound and expand the expressive potential result in his combining of two sources of sound. 

The piece From-To (1976.) is carried out on a line of constant juxtapositions of music and „non-music“, the beautiful and the ugly, the poetic and the „non-poetic“, the moving and the inaction, the lyric and the dramatic. It is a spiral of easy mocking – and admiring – the kitsch, which is cute, sticky, limited on one side and aggressive, barbaric and destructive on the other. It's an image of the world – from the disgusting to the wonderful and back – intentionally hinted at by the „empty“ title, its original Croatian title (Od do) even read the same way from both sides.
In the cycle Monos (coming into existence from 1972 to 1982) the position of a detached and autonomous tonal entity juxtaposed to the huge conglomerate of an acoustic unity is explored differently. They are the studies of  the unique dessin of minimal dynamics and movement which is constantly overlapping and changing almost unnoticeably.This is the matter of an insoluble problem regarding an independent acoustic cell thrown into the endless and indifferent cosmos of silence. The cell reaffirms itself  by calling out from the silence repeatedly, painted always with different nuances of sonority; then listens attentively to its echo for quite some time as if overseeing obediently its own disappearance. Monos III is created 1972, Monos IV 1974.
The concrete-electronic music Phonomorphia 1, created (1967) at the Experimetal Studio of the Polish Radio, is the author's first work in this field. It is based on an electronic transformation of three major elements: human voice, percussion and piano. Their primary sound (so-called material) were recorded by well-known Polish artists baritone Jerzy Artisz and percussionist Jerzy Wo?niak together with the author at the piano. The short study is built in the shape of a bow, and it is at its climax that the contorted commotion of the human voice, whirling drums and vibrating piano strings reach an ecstasy.
Phonomorphia 2 for piano and electronics (1968) is a sort of dedication to the instrument of the composer's life – piano. It unfolds on three levels and in three layers, using the classical, mechanically prepared and electronized pianos. In the process, it remains true to the task, set to it by the title of composition: exploring some unknown shapes of sound in space and time, and examining how spatiality gets along in the musical and musicality in the spatial. Both essential components of sound can be perceived in this trialogue: the piano, transformed through electronics, functioning as the line, and the traditional or prepared piano defending the dot. In the persistent filling the space with sound and emptying it from it, the original sound is constantly subject to fragmentation and augmentation, or, more precisely, it accumulates or disperses around one single note. The end confronts the author with the so far unsolvable question: how to stop the sound in such a way that it, still there, continues to last.  
In the cycle entitled Graphies (1967-1973) only the formal plan and the parameters were written down, the final execution being left to the initiative of the interpreters. Since the starting suggestions were at first conceived plastically, it was only later that they were written down as new musical symbols, traditional notation having been discarded. Graphie I (1968) is like a fresco covered with unexpected sound mutations and gradations. The work provokes an awareness of the possibility of duration of a space in which, by means of sounds, time is first measured and then discontinued alternately, while the frame-space itself (once created) seems to endure without the elements which constitute it, or incessantly survives, in fact, the end of the composition.    
Banalia (from 1999) has been composed in the form of ironic, grotesque-lyrical variations in which the lexical semantics favours the musical transformation of word, while the human voice, under the influence of electronic music, assumes unusual and surprising transformations. The work is dedicated to the life-giving mass of hundreds or thousands of common, simple and unburdened people, harmless creators and enjoyers of everyday life, a kind of mental idlers with whom the composer had to work on various occasions. From their standpoint, they are happy and great people. Their moves show that they are not frightened of objects or phenomena, their voices say that they are ready to outwit the Nature point-blank. They rule the world, their speed and cunning are beastly unattainable. Their premonition is supernatural, inconceivable and comprehensive. Their noises, without the use of any coherent word, are wise and efficient. Their word is always the final one resulting in a divine and inevitable control of our lives.
White Music and Black Music were composed 1988, and the guiding ideas behind these works are: the use of micro-melodic modes in white or black colours; the building of micro-rhythmic, constantly repeated new polyphonic structures with a planned mistake and every correction leading towards a new, somewhat anticipated misunderstanding that only stimulates the dramatic feature of a seemingly monotonous event; further questioning of the paradox in which the utmost leap in the notation structure gives an impression of stopping, general paralysis of the flow, while the gradual slowing down seems as a new liveliness of the movement; more intense search for the fact that the white register sometimes sounds darker than the black register (and reversely); an attempt of a different performing style („playing music in colour“) included in the usual „black-and-white“ style.   
Fable (1973) consists of vocal-instrumental-electronic paraphrases: of Macbeth's final monologue from Shakespeare's Macbeth (Tomorrow...), the lyrical poem To Daffodils by the English poet  Robert Herrick (1591-1674) and the tale of a weak-minded hero from Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. At the centre of attention, in these thirteen contrasting, but mutually connected, fragments, there lies the word, a false and untrue, shallow  prop, the metaphor of the dreadful, horrible absurdity we are surrounded by – but no word is intelligibly said out loud. It is only at the end of the piece that it becomes obvious how the repeated cry is but an illusion of the real word, the onomatopoeia of a message and of a sense that actually do not exist.
Dubravko Detoni