Señales (2012)

Musical performance has a lot to do with signs or signals, with señales, whether cues, indications from a conductor, or the printed propositions of the score, to all of which a musician has to respond immediately and purposefully. The product of musical performance – music – is itself loaded with signals, which we as listeners are invited to construe. In doing so, we may well feel that many of the signals are not directed only to us, but that we are witnessing the music’s signalling to itself: calling ahead, answering back, opening a new course or blocking it, making a demand or reviving a memory.

In the case of this piece, through twenty minutes of mostly fast music, we have a rush of such signals, outward and inward – and onward – projected by and to the dashing solo violin, with alertness and virtuosity just as vital right through the ensemble, which comprises three each of winds (flute, clarinet, and horn), strings (viola, cello, and bass), and plucked or struck instruments (harp, cimbalom doubling vibraphone and marimba, and percussion). Melodies or exuberant flourishes may involve quarter-tones; noise effects, especially on the wind instruments, are also part of the ceaseless flow of gestures, of señales. There is also a subtitle, “Homenaje a Jonathan Harvey,” to whose Fourth Quartet there are oblique references in two transitional passages. “But more than anything,” Paredes has said, “I wanted to make a small tribute to a composer whose honesty and highly spiritual music have been inspiring to me.” At the same time, another musician is being remembered, since much of the material derives from a solo violin piece Paredes wrote in memory of Thomas Kakuska, long-time viola player of the Alban Berg Quartet. The work sets out from a slow, also low introduction. Winds and strings begin by extending the notes of the interplay between harp and cimbalom, but soon branch out, introducing ideas to be played out later – notably, running bits of scale, in quarter tones, on strings, which come to take over the music and ring up the curtain on the soloist. His entry, with a signal gesture that is soon repeated, speeds the music up and also lifts it into a new register, though this is a register the others are reluctant to enter, which only adds to the brilliance with which the violin stands out, in lively figuration alternating with developments of the quartertone scales.

Loud dissonances from the strings with heavy bow pressure weigh the music down, but only briefly before the violin takes off again, quietly at first, in streams of double stops based again on quarter-tone scales, and then into wilder reaches. The ensemble, left almost speechless a while, crashes back and a slow section ensues, initially dominated by the strings, subsequently featuring dialogue between the strings with harp plus vibes and the wind, with “whistle tones” from the flute. Out of this comes a swirling dance into another dialogue, between excited static harmonies on harp, marimba, and low strings on the one side and quartertone double stops from the soloist on the other.

At roughly the halfway point, a brief recall of the slow section disappears off the top edge of the pitch spectrum and gives way to a long fast passage developing the ideas further. There is just a short break, after which the quarter-tone scales return. Then the soloist goes off into airy flights, prompted—signalled—by the ensemble. The cadenza eventually has the cimbalom joining in, to convey the violin back among the other instruments for the work’s climax and aftermath. (Paul Griffiths)