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- Sofia Gubaidulina
Two Songs on German Folk Poetry (Zwei Lieder nach deutschen Volksdichtungen) (1988)
- Hans Sikorski Russian Works (USA, Canada and Mexico only)
Dedicated to Roswitha Sperber; commissioned by the Heidelberg Festival Ensemble. Available in the USA, Canada and Mexico only
Programme Note
Composer note:
It was the greatest impudence on my part to select well-known, tremendously popular German texts for my purely Russian perception. But I couldn’t resist the remarkable possibility of juxtaposing two such sharply contrasting poems; the complete depth and seriousness of the first and the paradoxical dismissal of this seriousness in the rather coarse joke of the second.
Besides which, these texts offered me many additional possibilities. For example: to underline with purely instrumental means in one of them the idea of the trinity (life-death-world), and in the other quaternity (man-woman-bucket-hole).
What also arose in the process was the gratifying possibility of placing the accent specifically on the hole, which is, after all, the most profound metaphor space. The American physicist, Van Allan, gives the following definition of space, "Space is the hole in which we sit.” Thus, the compositional solution of how to deal with the hole is important.
But then I ran into the insurmountable contradiction between the German text and its Russian translation. In German the text reads, "LaB es sein…” (Let it be…) and in Russian: "Sei Teufel mit diesem Loch…” (To the devil with this hole…)
Needless to say, these are fundamentally different resolutions of the issue.
What proved to be my salvation was the idea that I could leave the prerogative of selection up to the performer. In fact, the circular progress achieved in this text allows one to treat it like a meditation whose center of concentration is the hole, empty space, NULLUM, the symmetrized point of being.
But then I could borrow for instance, one of the meditative texts "Aus den sieben Tagen.” There we find, "Play individual sounds with complete abandon until You feel the warmth emanating from within Yourself…”
So I can propose to my soloist, "Go around in a circle until you feel yourself ready to make a choice between the two variants of the last refrain.”
In that way the correct solution of the problem will arise completely naturally during the process of performance: whether to leave the hole alone or send it to the devil.
Nevertheless, just like any other pragmatic woman, I believe that there must be a hole in a bucket that has a flower growing in it.
Two Songs on German Folk Poetry are dedicated to Roswitha Sperber, with love.
---Sofia Gubaidulina
It was the greatest impudence on my part to select well-known, tremendously popular German texts for my purely Russian perception. But I couldn’t resist the remarkable possibility of juxtaposing two such sharply contrasting poems; the complete depth and seriousness of the first and the paradoxical dismissal of this seriousness in the rather coarse joke of the second.
Besides which, these texts offered me many additional possibilities. For example: to underline with purely instrumental means in one of them the idea of the trinity (life-death-world), and in the other quaternity (man-woman-bucket-hole).
What also arose in the process was the gratifying possibility of placing the accent specifically on the hole, which is, after all, the most profound metaphor space. The American physicist, Van Allan, gives the following definition of space, "Space is the hole in which we sit.” Thus, the compositional solution of how to deal with the hole is important.
But then I ran into the insurmountable contradiction between the German text and its Russian translation. In German the text reads, "LaB es sein…” (Let it be…) and in Russian: "Sei Teufel mit diesem Loch…” (To the devil with this hole…)
Needless to say, these are fundamentally different resolutions of the issue.
What proved to be my salvation was the idea that I could leave the prerogative of selection up to the performer. In fact, the circular progress achieved in this text allows one to treat it like a meditation whose center of concentration is the hole, empty space, NULLUM, the symmetrized point of being.
But then I could borrow for instance, one of the meditative texts "Aus den sieben Tagen.” There we find, "Play individual sounds with complete abandon until You feel the warmth emanating from within Yourself…”
So I can propose to my soloist, "Go around in a circle until you feel yourself ready to make a choice between the two variants of the last refrain.”
In that way the correct solution of the problem will arise completely naturally during the process of performance: whether to leave the hole alone or send it to the devil.
Nevertheless, just like any other pragmatic woman, I believe that there must be a hole in a bucket that has a flower growing in it.
Two Songs on German Folk Poetry are dedicated to Roswitha Sperber, with love.
---Sofia Gubaidulina