NagyMusic

… of the lake II

As a sequel to an earlier piano piece, …of the lake, the submitted work continues to explore the concept of an étude from the perspective of both performance and composition. The pianistic technique and compositional design of … of the lake II is structured around the notion of a constantly changing appearance of musical harmony, rhythm, texture, and piano resonance. It resembles the surface of a lake or sea that gradually transforms itself by arriving to the shore. As the morphing of the water’s waves embraces a physical constraint imposed by the shore, sand, and stone, the music of this piano work finds meaning in a gradual transformation of wave-like musical gestures and melodic fragments within a clearly predefined tonal and metric palette.

Music cognition, research on emotion in music, and the relationship between musical works and listeners are major influences on contemporary music culture, and all of these impact my continuing formation as a composer and performer. As a composer, I seek to deepen the understanding of the psychological dimensions of music. The fascination with the perceptual qualities of tone and durational systems, together with their theoretical hierarchies within Western musical culture, has been a principal influence on musical discourse in my recent compositions. In both vocal and instrumental works, I often draw inspiration from the philosophy of sound perception and its relation to performance practice, spirituality, and the notion of inner self.

In … of the lake II, I consider the empirical claim that listeners across cultures and with different degrees of musical training hear pitches and durations as relatively close or distant from a particular tonic or important metric position within a piece of music. Taking the concept of tonal pitch and meter space as a primary mode of musical syntax and discourse, I created a number of interdependent processes that create patterns of musical tension and relaxation. While composing the piece, I was interested in capturing the wave-like perceptual attractions between different pitches, causing the listener to establish very clear melodic and metric expectations and grouping schemas. The result is an emotional plethora of evolving melodic lines and more or less fulfilled anticipations of their growth and decay.

The work is dedicated to a dear friend and colleague of mine, the pianist David Kalhous, who will premiere it at Texas Tech University School of Music, Lubbock, TX, in a concert of the 20th and 21st French music, with an emphasis on spectralism. During the event, you’ll be able to listen to the performance live on the internet on the university website.

Invocation – A Meditation For Orchestra

A couple of years ago, while admiring that eclectic elegance and aura of Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, I drafted a poem, or as a matter of fact, a prayer that would eventually inspire a modest organ work composed during my graduate work at Northwestern. This organ work entitled, Invocation, represents my initial attempts in creating a personal harmonic language inspired at the time by captivating psycho-acoustical principles, as well as by a desire to portray an experience of prayer through sound.

in the air
of hope
my
prayer
for
your
calmness
and love beyond

As part of my work as a musician I spend a considerable amount of time reflecting on the sacred. I often ask myself that ubiquitous and venerated question, “Is it possible to depict something so complex, grand, and mysterious like the divine through music?” At first sight, it seems to me that one is able to at least [re]create a ‘musical’ experience that would bring people closer to the ‘feelings’ of meditation and prayer. After all and when in doubt, it is also good to turn to other musicians for inspiration who arguably sought to express a similar musical experience. As Christoph Wolff in his remarkable tome on Bach’s biography, J. S. Bach: A Learned Musician, states,

Bach’s compositions, as the exceedingly careful musical elaborations that they are, may epitomize nothing else that the difficult task of finding himself an argument for the existence of God — perhaps the ultimate goal of his musical science.” (p. 339)

Recently, I expanded Invocation into a work for symphony orchestra. While it undoubtedly bears formal and structural resemblance to its origin, this new piece is a work in its own right, crafted to the requirements of a large orchestra while still keeping its very personal quality. You can view a score excerpt here:

A Book of Hours Revisited

Last Winter I had a privilege to premiere a new piano work, A Book of Hours, at The Art Institute of Chicago. The work takes four poems-prayers by Thomas Merton, each attributed to a period of the day: Dawn – Day – Dusk – Dark. As a Trappist monk, Merton was a poet very much interested in the contemporary notion of spirituality and mysticism. His collection of poems, prayers, and reflections, A Book of Hours, mirrors the ancient form of prayers that evolved into daily and weekly cycles of prayers, responses, antiphones, and other spiritual readings.

Each movement in this multi-movement piano mediates on a daily prayer taken from a particular day during the week. As a result, a movement acts as an auditory meditation encapsulated in both the act of performance and listening. Not long ago, I decided to revisit these pieces as to enhance their musical, spiritual, and aesthetic meaning. I am currently working on expanding the work and hope to have it completed by this Spring.

Sink from your shallow, soul, into eternity.
We touch the rays we cannot see.
We feel the light that seems to sing.

(Responsory, Dawn of Monday)

Our hearts are heavens
And our eyes are light-years deep.
Sounding Your will, Your peace, in its unbounded fathoms:
Oh balance all our turning orbits till that morning,
Upon the center and level of Your holy love:
Than lock our souls forever in the nucleus of its Law.

(Prayer, Day of Wednesday)

Justify my Soul, O God,
from Your fountains fill my will with fire.
Shine on my mind, “be darkness to my experience,”
occupy my heart with your tremendous Life.
I will hear your voice and I will hear all harmonies You have created.

(Evening Hymn, Dusk of Sunday)

Midnight!
Kissed with flame!
See! See!
My love is darkness!

Only in the Void
Are all ways one:

Only in the night
Are all lost
Found.

In my ending is my meaning.

(from Night Hymn, Dark of Monday)

In a hope to portray the emotional ramifications embedded in some very familiar musical schemas, such as major-minor modalities or conventional piano textures, movements form A Book of Hours capture the flux as well the state of our inner self reflected through the polarities of the positive and negative emotional valences that are evoked and experienced by various musical expectations. In this piano work, I was very interested in exploring the perceptual quality of my newly developed harmonic and rhythmic Sonance Modes in relation to common tonal and metric systems of the Western music theory and practice. My wish was to explore how different scale tones reflect their psychological qualia when organized in a different fashion than the common practice tonal structures. I also wanted to compare how these tone sequence and harmonies relate to each other, especially from the viewpoint of melody, tonality, and meter perception. Of the main interest was the notion of expectancy of the Western listener. Once again, I ventured to discover whether I can express myself through a very personal musical language restrained by some fundamental perceptual condition common to the an average Western listener. What is more, I imagined this piano work almost as a study that would help me incorporate all the theoretical material as to grasp how perception, cognition, culture, compositional modeling, and performance combine to create a piece of music and result in a construction of meaning and emotion in musical experience.