Praya Dubia (2009)
(for orchestra)

PRAYA DUBIA is one of the longest creatures in the world, superficially resembling a giant jellyfish which can grow up to 50 metres long and lives a depth of several hundred metres. The “living drift net” is made up of thousands of polyps which shatter into many pieces when caught causing its death.

PRAYA DUBIA are Variations on a chord.

Esbjörn Svensson was a pianist, composer and joint founder of the Swedish Jazz Trio EST.
He died in 2008 at the age of 44.

These two differing and heterogeneous sources of inspiration were the starting point for the composition PRAYA DUBIA.

Several modes of thought overlap one another.

Sounds are, for me, deeply organic, natural and living; a tone generates not only oscillations in space but also in the human body,  they bring about interactions and interrelationships – inner and outer- sounds transform to lines, strands, branches, byways, clouds of chords, implosions or explosions, the linear become vertical, colours are created, atmospheres, densities. And the reverse.
I “play” with my experiences coming from my acquaintance with the  music of other cultures, especially the cultures of Asia and the Far East (since the late 1990s I have spent part of each year in various Asiatic countries, particularly those of Southeast Asia; the early 1990s were marked by intensive travels and stays in the USA, beginning with a scholarship in Tanglewood.)

The Swedish pianist and jazz musician Esbjörn Svensson, founder and leader of the Esbjörn Svensson Trio / EST (piano, percussion, double bass) is a very strong influence in my conception of the Work. His openness and holistic outlook I found and find extremely fascinating; he excluded nothing, did not play off one system against another, was open to everything, assimilating intensively and inspiringly, with tolerance, transforming and communicating.

I was similarly musically socialised in my childhood. My “homeless” father (his family came from Silesia and were scattered throughout Germany after the war, from Hamburg to Stuttgart and Central Germany) was a jazz musician, my grandfather a classical orchestral musician. At home were records of music by Mangelsdorff, Glen Miller, Beethoven, Avant-Garde music next to the Beatles. Fencing off, the “playing one off against the other” in cultures and genres, seeing everything as black and white, none of this had any role in my musical childhood. Thus improvisation was nurtured alongside the traditional musical education. 

Esbjörn Svensson: the initials of his name became sound, the organic sound became a theme and the theme shaped the form: Prologue - Theme - 9 Variations - Epilogue.

The nine phases of the Variations have a duration of some one to one and a half minutes each. In the Prologue and the Epilogue it is no accident that the main instruments are piano, percussion and double bass. The basic sound is altered by differing techniques, there is never a standstill, all is in motion. Only once are two central Variations separated from one another by a general rest: Nr. 8 and Nr. 9, all the other Variations flow attacca into each other.

From the Prologue to the end of the eighth Variation everything is in flux – like a great current.

The physical constitution of the sounds is dependent upon the placing of the intervals to one another, from the character of the intervals. The foundation tones C sharp, D,E,F, F sharp, A (partly supplemented by E flat), drawn from the initials of Esbjörn Svensson, are varied to differing types of scales, enlarged, reduced, permutated, layered, compressed.  The first Variations with their pulse of 140 + have a very fast basic tempo, from the sixth Variation onwards a stepwise Ritardando sets in which at the end of the eighth Variation having reached a tempo of 30 (half the human pulse) comes to a standstill in a general rest.

After this general rest an aleatorically structured implosion begins which flows into the Epilogue. In form this part is determined by the interchange and modification of material from the Prologue. Solo piano and strings played without a concrete pitch ends PRAYA DUBIA.

ALEATORIC in PRAYA DUBIA:

In the notation of PRAYA DUBIA aleatoric excerpts on their own and in combination with metrically definite fixed structures NEVER naturally correspond to the resulting sound – this is to be observed both in the rehearsal and the performance. Please do not try to reproduce the image of the score in these excerpts, this is not possible nor do I intend it. Flexibility and fuzziness in what I have in mind! Over the years I have developed a system of organic and flexible aleatoric which has its source from the most differing of influences. Ways of thinking from Cage, Feldman and the New York School in general play an important role as do philosophical approaches from Far Eastern thought as well as influences from architecture and physics. My scores are organic creations, simple and complex, ordered and unchecked.

Bernd Franke, 2011