Horaţiu Rădulescu, "Iubiri"

-- Liner Notes --

PYTHAGORAS' DREAMINGS

Horatiu Radulescu, an unusual personage of today's music, resembles the leading figure Edgar Varese because of his sound innovations. Starting at the end of the 1960's with his composition Credo for nine cellos (1969), Radulescu developed an original sound world from his fundamental research concerning the sound spectrum. The work that followed, Flood for the Eternal's Origins for four soloists, groups or ensembles (Darmstadt, 1972) is the direct application of this experimentation and of his necessity "to enter" into the sound to rediscover the ocean of vibrations that Pythagoras scrutinized two thousand years ago, to "turn the beautiful and heavy page of history, learning about discrusive logic, imitating immediate reality by an exacerbated pantomime of sounds, towards the world of sound-phenomena which create themselves MUSIC, a world which became then imminent."

Born on 7 January 1942 in Bucharest, Radulescu studied the violin with Nina Alexandrescu, a disciple of Georges Enesco and Jacques Thibaud. At the National Conservatory of Bucharest, he obtained the master diploma in composition under Professors Tiberiu Olah (composition), Stefan Niculescu (analysis) and Aurel Stroe (orchestration and formalized music). Between 1970 and 1972, he participated in the "Courses for new music" at Cologne (with Mauricio Kagel and Luc Ferrari) and in the "Summer Courses" at Darmstadt" (with John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti). From 1979 to 1981, he participated in a course in Paris at the IRCAM (computer-assisted composition and psycho-acoustics). He moved to Versailles in 1969 and becae a French citizen in 1974. As a consecration of his intense artistic activity, he became a 'resident' at the DAAD in Berlin (1988-89). Then he won the prize 'Villa medicis hors les murs' in 1990/91 and a sabbatical year under a scholarship from the French government in 1992.

Fighting against what he calls a 'discontinuous and manufactured music' and the 'acrobatics of the postwar period and its post-serial waste products', the composer is 'partisan', on the contrary, to music based on 'energy operating within a sound that is as continuous as possible' - in the lineage of Giacinto Scelsi and Gyorgy Ligeti. Radulescu thus explains his own theory in a book entitled Sound plasma - music of the future sign. Exploring the infinite universe of the harmonic spectrum, the composer analyses all the parameters of sound - duration, ptich, timber and pulse. He speaks of the 'realization by synthesis of the global sources of sound, living sound plasmas wherein all the micro-parameters possess an infinite number of micro-rhythms'. If the duration of a work is hardly important for Horatiu Radulescu, the attention of the listener must be concentrated upon these sound micro-phenomena - in that philosophy, he is united with the Rumanian School and his teachers from Bucharest. Melodies, like rhythms, seem to dissolve into a state of being. Far from neglecting the contribution of the four great historical types of composition - monody, polyphony, homophony and heterophony-, the musician, while trying to realize a synthesis of these ideas, imagines a 'phenomenological language of sound plasma' that is not 'more reducible than any of these compositions, but remains as their consequence'.

In the graphic style of Earle Brown's or Christian Wolff's scores, Radulescu's - extremely beautiful - abandon the traditional lined paper and are presented as diagrams. The music is visualized using illuminated designs accompanied by short explanatory texts. Following the example of the musician Giacinto Scelsi - considered as "the direct father of abstractions' whos music he discovered in 1972 -, Radulescu uses the 'scordatura spectrale' notably in Thirteen dreams ago for 11 strings (1978). This is a technique allowing the modification of the habitual tuning of one or several strings of an instrument. One may thus enlarge the instrument's tessitura and vary its color. It is a procedure that appears for the first time in occidental string music in the sixteenth century, then again with Bach - in the Fifth Suite for solo cello- and closer to our time in the compositions of Scelsi-Quartets -, Gerard Grisey - Periodes - or with Richard Hoffmann, Salvatore Sciarrino and James Tenney.

Already considred to be an innovator, Radulescu is even more so because of an 'instrument' that he conceived in 196 and that he has since developed: the 'sound icon'. It is a piano positioned vertically like a harp - 'thus resembling a religious object, a Byzantine icon' - whose cover has been taken off to give access to the strings. By passing one or several nylon cords treated with rosin - like that used on a bow - behind teh piano strings, one obtains sounds of an infinite resonance that have no equivalent among other instruments.

Masked behind sometimes rowdy declarations and almost creating a new language by placing in the same melting pot English, German, Latin, Italian, French and Rumanian for the titles of his pieces, Radulescu converses in Time with Pythagoras - Pythagoras' dreamings (1972) - , Mircea Eliade - Taaroa (1968/69) - , Shakespeare - the quartet Infinite to Be Cannot Be Infinite/Infinite Anit-Be Could Be Infinite (1976/87) - and Lao Tzeu - the piano Sonatas No. 2 "Being and non-being create each other" (1990/91) and No. 4 "Like a well...Older than God (1993). A mystic? Radulescu is certainly, but it is a mysticism without concessions, molded from utopia and turned towards a poetic art that is expressed through an excess found in certain compositions. However one must not forget that his music is marked by a 'languishin' nostalgia, as defined by the text of his piece Doruind (for forty-eight voices, 1976) whose title is derived from Rumanian and means both 'desire' and 'nostalgia': the 'desire' is contained in 'pain'.

His recent compositions - since the 1980's - show an extreme refinement: he attempts less to provoke a sound continuity, than to assemble crystalline micro-melodies using multiple rhythms. In this new stage where the melodic aspect is more easily detected, the composer enrolls in a Neo-Byzantine liturgical tradition extending from 7th century Roman chant to certain scores of Szymanowski, Bartok, Enesco and Stravinsky. Thus the embryos of hymns - tropes, kondaks and canons - are found in the Byzantine Prayer for forty flutes (1987), in the vocal lines of Vetrata for twenty four vocalists and three sound icons (1991/92), in the viola duet Agnus Dei (1992), in "Cloches byzantines" (Byzantine Clocks) of the Sonate no. 2 for piano (1990/91), or still yet in the second movement 'le son scre' (the sacred sound) and third movement 'musique plus agee que la musique' (music older than music) -based on two Transylvanian Christmas carols - of the Sonata no. 4 for piano (1992/93).

Following Horatiu Radulescu's residence at Villeneuve d'Ascq (in the North Pas de Calais region of France) in march and April 1994 and at a festival - Polychromy 94 'Au-dela des limites...Espaces infinis' (Beyond the limits - Limitless Space) from April 11 to 15, where several major works of Radulescu were played -, this recording (the first!) of the Ensemble Polychromie directed by Nvart Andreassian leaves a concrete prolongation of the fruitful meeting of a composer with his interpreters.

Iubiri

for 16 instrumentalists (2 flutes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, horn, trumpet, trombone, percussion and string quintet) and sound icon (1980-1981)
A commission of the French Ministry of Culture (1981)

Premiere: Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou (1981), Ensemble Itineraire conducted by Yves Prin. Other performances: the Rencontres Internationales of Darmstadt in 1984; Ars Musica, Brussels, 1993 and Lucero Festival, Paris 1993.

Dedication: "To my mother"

Iubiri is the Rumanian plural of "iubire" (love). The word "iubire" is a Latinization of the Russian word "lioubovi", just as the words "Liebe" or "love" are derived from Sanskrit. The work consists of 343 unique "iubiri" (loves), 343 unique "micro-music/orchestrations" that during forty-seven minutes integrate seven acoustical spectrums in the style of seven large historical tonal regions. "The fundamentals of these seven acoustical 'solar' systems, are themselves the seven first new harmonics of the initial C: C, G, E, B flat, D, F monesis, G triesis. This progressive macro-formal modulation gives a sentiment of continual ascension even if the global evolution of the registers is written in "sleeping hourglass" of seven octaves -, focal unison with "halo" -, and progressively reopens to seven octaves.

The 343 unique "micro-musics" (loves) arrive like explosions/implosions, "illuminations" issuing from a musical sphere", a sphere with equidistant meridians by which these 343 "musics" pulse with a "divinely diabolical" periodicity. The seven macro-speeds of this periodicity themselves describe an irregular curve: 6-5-4-2-7-1-3.

The pitches used by the musicians are spectral components with an intense "life-timber", spectrality of spectrum, "emanation of the emanation". The formants/chords (zero degree of this music) describe zones: explicit compact spectrums; inverted spectral regions - secondary functions, tertiary in low pitches, primary functions, auto-generating spectrums, p.E. "ring functions".

By very complex and often complimentary dynamic profiles, these spectral functions - "frequency plateaus" with intense life (timber, dynamics, micro-rhythms, etc.) - acquire the perceptive qualities of monody, polyphony or homophony that change at high speed." From this extremely detailed writing, a sonorous plasma arises, rich with various kinds of information. The listener can perceive melodies that are not played directly by the interpreters, but whose origin is found in the harmonics. -- Franck Mallet, July 1994, Translated by Mary Dibbern