GEORGES LENTZ - composer / sound artist
 
 

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About 'Anyente' from 'Mysterium' ("Caeli enarrant..." VII) for solo viola (2019-2024)     Anyente for solo viola, conceived for the 2020 Bonn Beethoven Festival upon violist Tabea Zimmermann's request, was initially intended as a short response to that year's Beethoven celebrations. The original piece was in particular concerned with the composer's deafness and loneliness in later years (my original working title was "taub", German for "deaf"). After the contemporary part of that festival was cancelled due to the outbreak of COVID, I put the piece away and only picked it up again to take it along on a journey to the Australian Outback in 2021. On that trip, I was overwhelmed again by the country's deep silence and its radiant night skies, and my viola piece moved beyond its original Beethoven references to become more generally a meditation on our human fragility and loneliness (Anyente is a word from one of the languages of the people of Eastern Arrernte and means one or alone.) Rhythmically, the viola piece became a bit of a trial run for my new violin concerto, which I was also working on at the same time. It is above all a continuation of my viola, orchestra and electronics piece Monh, also written for Tabea, and Anyente literally picks up where Monh left off. A glittering night sky is pierced again and again by deep blackness and silence, as if all matter was sucked out of the sound/universe. Long, hushed strings of notes take their queues from my love of Indigenous art, as in many of my works, especially the strings of dotted lines found in Kathleen Petyarre's work. This ethereal musical argument then progressively turns into its obsessive rhythmical opposite, a hammering of fortissimo chords, before the staccato music is eventually counterbalanced by a long and lonely cantabile line full of melancholy sadness. The work attempts to find a reconciliation between these sharply opposing characters, often struggling to break out of one character into something new. The music is eventually taken over by its relentless rhythmic drive, before crashing into the depths and disappearing progressively into disembodied nothingness (a niente!) - further highlighting the work's ultimate sense of resignation, solitude and isolation. The first performance of Anyente in its final version was given by Tabea Zimmermann at Pierre-Boulez-Saal in Berlin on December 1, 2024.