Darkness as Evidence of Light with Roseminna Watson

Darkness as Evidence of Light
(Created during my own recovery from a series spinal injuries, to be played as a ritual for calling in healing)

Music for solo violin that speaks to the inextricability of darkness and light

Selections by :
György Kurtág, Reena Esmail,
Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and Roseminna Watson

I will begin with selections from György Kurtág’s set of miniatures — Signs, Games, and Messages — which offers wide-ranging gestural distillates of sentiment through homáges and postcards to colleagues, friends and cultures. 

Limbic Hymnal, composed by me in 2015, will follow. This piece also takes the form of miniatures in a set. Roseminna describes Limbic Hymnal as a conflictive conversation — and ultimately a reconciliatory joining — between two dichotomous parts of the same self.

When the Violin — by Reena Esmail — is based on the Indian Raga called Charukeshi, and a Hafiz poem that begins “When the violin can forgive the past / the heart begins to sing.” The raga, a perfect marriage between major and minor, follows a winding path through the human experience, where there are but steps between dark shadow and blinding light. Esmail calls Raga Charukshi “the sound of the soul cracking open.”

Passacaglia, by Franz Joseph Ignaz Von Biber will bring the music to a close. Passacaglia, which means “walking the streets” in Italian, was written in 1672 as one in a set of sonatas called the Rosary Sonatas or the Mystery Sonatas. Musically as well as conceptually, Biber mingles the sacred with the mundane. The continually repeating baseline of four descending notes — the scaffolding upon which the entire piece is constructed —  symbolizes the Guardian Angel as a steady and protective force disguised within the every-day action of walking, whose presence creates a container for the filigree of life’s unfolding through ever-more intricate and exultant variations.  

The dance between darkness and light — transcendence and descent — has been and continues to be one of the most elemental concepts in musical and artistic history. It is so present within all that we experience, and yet still so mysterious and fascinating.