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Last modified 24 April 2022
Toward Another World: LAMENT [SHARESPACE III] (2010-2017)
(Clarinet and Computer Musician)
by Roger Reynolds
Toward Another World: LAMENT originated as a portion of a larger project for Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic entitled ILLUSION. An interest in the surprising and illuminating relevance of ancient Greek tragedy to our contemporary travails had drawn me into a cycle of works: The Red Act. They arose out of the relationship of Agamemnon (prioritizing obligation to the state) and Clytemnestra (prioritizing domestic relationships), and in particular the fatal conflict that arose between them over the sacrifice of their young daughter, Iphigenia, an act that the gods assured him would serve to free the becalmed Greek fleet to sail against Troy.
The Greek tragedies often have a startling contemporaneity, but Euripides’s treatment of Iphigenia, in Iphigenia in Aulis, struck me as differing significantly from what I would expect now. She is portrayed as passing through three stages that I used as the titles of the movements that make up Toward Another World: LAMENT. It is the last that surprises.
I. Innocence
II. Awakening
III. Resolve
A few phrases from the text underlying each movement will suggest their moods:
INNOCENCE
Iphigenia:
O father, it is a good and
Wonderful thing you have done – bringing me here!
You say you are glad to see me
But your eyes have no quiet in them.
Oh turn away from all of them
My father – be here and mine only, now!
Agamemnon:
I am. Now I am nowhere but in this place,
And with you utterly, my darling.
AWAKENING
Iphigenia:
O my father –
If I had the tongue of Orpheus
So that I could charm with song the stones to
Leap and follow me ...
– I'd use
My magic now. But only with tears can I
Make arguments …
O father, … Do not take this life
Of mine before its dying time.
RESOLVE
Iphigenia:
It is wrong for me to love life too deeply. …
Our country suffers, and so thousands
Of men arm themselves, thousand more in ships
Pick up their oars.
... but I with my one life
To save, am I to prevent all?
To Greece I give this body of mine. …
These things coming to pass, Mother … They will be
My children, my marriage, …
My good name and my glory.
– Translation by Richmond Lattimore
While the first two stages rang true, the idea that a contemporary young woman would place the interests of country above self, and do so in such a way as to find satisfaction in the nobility of her acceptance, felt less plausible.
In writing for the clarinet, I explored its extraordinary range of dynamic subtlety,
its capacity for innocence, for reliable micro-tonal passage work, the use of higher partial components, the bending of held tones, the raw aggressiveness of which it is capable.
For this project, brief fragments in performed realizations of passages from the score were made. They were exactingly optimized as “seeds” with quasi-genetic implications to be used in algorithmic extensions and elaborations. The aim was to summon up a complementary circumstance where clarinetist and computer musician are fully aware of what they each can offer in a performance, but they can never precisely anticipate how their interactions will develop in a particular performance. The computer sounds and those produced by the clarinet are in a state of constant interplay and adjustment.
This work was premiered on 31 July 2017 by Anthony Burr and Jacob Sundstrom at the Society for Music Perception and Cognition Conference at UC San Diego.
– Roger Reynolds
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