The Courier's Tragedy

[Otto]

The Courier's Tragedy
Komponist: 	Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen
Titel: 	The Courier's Tragedy
Untertitel: 	Für Violoncello
Reihe: 	exempla nova 446
Besetzung: 	Vc
Einband: 	KT
Format: 	29,7 x 42,0 cm
Editionsnummer: 	SIK8646
ISMN: 	9790003037899
Preis: 	€ 52,00

The Courier's Tragedy is a part of my Pynchon Cycle, comprised of the
following works: The Tristero System for Ensemble (Duration: 18'), The
Courier's Tragedy für Violoncello solo (19') W.A.S.T.E. for Oboe and
Live Elektronics (18') D.E.A.T.H. for Eight-track tape (12') The
starting point of the Pynchon Cycle is the novel The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon, who I consider one of the most important novelists
of our time, and with whom I feel much in common, above all a paranoid
world-view of a thoroughly amoralized and dehumanized
(entbürgerlicht?) society, as can be seen in the present-day
megapolis. In a conscious distancing from other cycles of the
immediate present--such as those by György Kurtág, Daniel Libeskind
and Zaha Hadid--I was concerned in this cycle with something hard,
almost brutal, with the logical consequentiality of ultimately
senseless procedures which appear to mediate everything with
everything else, without being able to create thereby anything
meaningful. To this "hardness" I responded in my selection of
material, consciously acknowledged as hideous; in addition, the
compositional and therefore formal strategies are settled on the
border of what a composer educated in the fine old European tradition
might consider fractured and distorted. The Courier's Tragedy
translates the narrative structure Renaissance horror-play of the same
name from The Crying of Lot 49 by means of a mechanical sequence of
numbers and proportions, which are applied to all levels of the
construction, this consciously independent of whether this was
musically "sensible" or not. The cold rationality of a complex
networking here corresponds to a paranoid sense-lessness. In The
Courier's Tragedy, the cellist is placed in an absurd situation: the
score is notated on 12 systems, which simultaneously offer a multitude
of potentials for sonic shaping and, due to their internal
contradictions, appear to render their realization impossible. During
the course of the theatrical piece unfolded in a prologue, five acts
and an epilogue, the sovereignty of the interpreter as master of the
instrument is systematically undermined, until at the end the
possibility of playing the cello itself is rendered impossible.
Exhausted and robbed of his expressive capabilities, the player plays
in a void and attempts in vain to attain melodic quality from the
wooden body, a quality that the four strings have long since
surrendered.

(Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf)

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