Aurora

Tasso, Torquato (I)

"The Company of Music, which commissioned my composition AURORA, wished my new work to be closely related to Monteverdi – a composer with whom I have a particularly close relationship for many reasons.
I decided to use the same text, 'Ecco mormorar l'onde', by the Italian Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso, which Monteverdi also used for his famous madrigal of the same name from 1590.
From Tasso's text, I isolate individual fragments that evoke powerful natural images and are capable of capturing consistent moods. They form the basis for the six movements of AURORA. Each movement attempts, in a different way, to create a self-contained, unified contemporary quasi-Renaissance polyphony: each participating voice shapes the overarching musical structure vertically, but at the same time is meaningfully organized horizontally and cantually in its own right.
I combine some of Monteverdi's stylistic devices (rhythmic tone repetitions, "I combine my musical foundation (e.g., melodic triad refractions, etc.) with contemporary techniques to generate my basic musical material. Through a kind of 'musical THEN,' a 17-note line, I organize both the harmonies and the possibilities of individual melodic progression in broad strokes. Thanks to this hidden primal line, my piece finds a personal sonority. Nevertheless, to my ears, it harmonizes with Monteverdi's style, as it strives for a similarly homogeneous 'interwovenness' of the individual voices." (Gerald Resch)