Unsuk Chin - Miroirs des temps (1999)

ATTB soloists with orchestra.

The work is a cycle of seven movements, with recurring references to love and death. Two are careful re-workings of a Cypriot virelai and a ballata by Johannes Ciconia – both from the early 15th century, the golden era of the late Gothic period in European music. The first and last movements could be described as homages to Perotin and the third movement as a homage to Machaut.

The ideas of the mirror and complementary reflection dominate the ideas behind, and musical content of, Chin’s entire cycle. The stimulus was Machaut’s famous rondeau "Ma fin est mon commencement et mon commencement ma fin", of which, however, only the text is quoted in the third movement. This particular rondeau is the earliest example of a musical palindrome – in other words a work in which the component parts sound the same if played forwards or backwards. The composer has used the same structural idea, but has expanded the three parts in the Machaut work up to as many as eighteen! A specific example from the third movement’s second section, scored for recorder quartet, wind quartet, vocal quartet and string sextet, reveals the following: soprano recorder and piccolo play a crab canon and at the same time are rhythmically complementary to one another (using hocket technique); tenor recorder and counter-tenor also play a crab canon as well as bassoon and second tenor. All other parts reverse themselves from the middle of the section – a technique also used in the first section of the third movement and in the fourth movement. This delicately flowing second section uses all voices throughout, whereas the first section becomes more dense towards the middle and gradually thins out at the end. In the third section the strict linear concept becomes more relaxed, the palindrome principle is only occasionally used in individual parts and, instead, the orchestral colours become more important again. Intervals of a third dominate the movement as a whole, both harmonically and melodically.

The idea of the palindrome is significant for the entire cycle. Movements I and VII become mirror images reflected at the imaginary centre of the work; in other words, the seventh movement is the inversion of the first movement, with the reverse ordering extending even to the text. In contrast with the highly elaborate polyphony of movements III and V, the surrounding movements refer to the simpler homophonic model of organum. The orchestra accompanies with a pulsating, sparkling fabric of sound – a 20th century ‘reflection’ on the musical beginnings of this ending millennium.

Around the centre of the work – in which beginning and end run together – the individual movements are organised to complement one another: the fatal suffering of the lover in Ciconia’s ballata "Merçé, o morte" is contrasted with the almost paradisiac fulfillment of love in the anonymous Cypriot love poem. The Latin sentences of the first movement (a compilation from different liturgical texts), in which the omnipotence of death over life is expressed, are contradicted in Fernando Pessoa’s poem "A morte é a curra da estrada". The palindrome evokes the musical equivalent of suspension of time, the victory over temporality, thereby symbolising the triumph over death: "Morrer é só não ser visto" (Death removes one only from sight).

(Frank Harders-Wuthenow)
Many thanks to Simon Cummings of http://5against4.com for recording this work in the first place.

Видео Unsuk Chin - Miroirs des temps (1999) канала Contemporary Classical