21 plays

Six Bagatelles for Music Boxes and Electronics. I. Massig

This will be the first of six short pieces I am recording in tribute to one of my favourite pieces of music of all time: Anton Webern’s Six Bagatelles for String Quartet. Unlike Webern’s bagatelles, mine are not written using tone rows (but they are atonal), and could not be played live (due to the large amount of post-recording electronic and digital manipulation) but hopefully they have something of the spirit of Webern’s work, of which Arnold Schoenberg wrote, “Every glance can be expanded into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath: such concentration can only be found where self-pity is lacking in equal measure. These pieces can only be understood by those who believe that sounds can say things which can only be expressed by sound.”

04/27/09 at 9:31pm