Or, here we go Agon.

Trying to stay in touch with the Peddars way piece on a daily basis, I’ve been mildly angsting with large, scribbled A3 diagrams as to how all the various elements will organize themselves: everything is related, and, (ahem) it isn’t.

Thinking about it as I composed out various sections based on particular churches, it seemed what I had was a suite a of parts, some quite disjunct, and getting more so as I looked for ways to add improvisatory sections for the sax based on the church resonances I had been gathering with John Ward. And there’s also the possibility of getting the rest of the ensemble in on the fun, in a semi-aleatoric-kind-of-way.

A couple of models occured to me; the first was Stravinsky’s Agon, because it combines two radically different compositionsal approaches literally bolted together as a dance suite over a two year period when he went through a major and traumatic stylistic shift, adapting his previous way of working to incorporate his personal take on the serialist school he felt he was being superceded by. Even Boulez (after dimissing Stravinsky as a reactionary for years), one of the most total of the total serialists, admitted Agon had opened a new sound, and declared it one of the seminal pieces of the mid-twentieth century.

What interests me about it is that there was a major break between starting and finishing it, maybe precipitated by a late-mid-life crisis of relevancy. The older parts of the suite are still in his neo-classical style, while others explore his personal take on serialism. And they are shuffled up and combined so there’s no telling what you get next. But, amazingly, there’s no sense of which is which; and the listener would be hard pressed to point out such an incredible shift in aesthetic and method between sections. So there is hope.

The second was the open and luminous settings of folk songs by Berio; eleven songs from different cultures, each one different. They each give a nod towards the style in which they arose, like the acerbic Gaelic fiddle and harp accompianiment in the first piece, Black is the Color…. Although it doesn’t quite have the same stylistic cohesiveness as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, it also manages to set each song in a unique texture; like Schoenberg, using differing elements of a small ensemble in constantly changing colors. And the fiddle part oddly echoes the violin solo in the first Pas-de Trois of Agon.

So they both sit on my piano/desk.