Garden of Joy and Sorrow

Francisco Tanzer

This one-movement piece, written in 1980, is characterised by an exquisite, extremely subtle sound colouring that is reminiscent of the music of the Orient, if only because the instruments have to play predominantly in high registers. There are also echoes of oriental music in the fluctuating glissando sounds (for example at the beginning of the piece, when a long glissando is to be played on the harp with the clef), as well as in the melismatic melody, which is linked to various types of trills, and finally in the title of the work. In the flexible confrontation of tempered tuning as an artificially created order and the overtone series as the ‘natural state’ of music, the trio with its sound symbolism also has a philosophical background against which the relationship between subject and object is thematised. At the same time, the composition is indebted to two contrasting literary influences: the book ‘Sayat-Nova’ by Iv Oganov about a famous oriental narrator and singer, and the poems of Francisco Tanzer, a passage from whose diary the composer has modelled the score on:

When is it really over?
What is the true end?
All boundaries are like a piece of wood
or a shoe heel
drawn into the earth.

Until then ...,
here is the boundary. Everything is artificial.
Tomorrow we play
another game.