Here is my submission for the June 2008 competition. It is written for
2 violins I, 2 violins II, 2 violas, 1 cello and 1 contrabass and is based
on the following text:
"A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening
to commerce and minds opening to ideas. A day will come when the bullets
and bombs are replaced by votes, by universal suffrage, by the venerable
arbitration of a great supreme senate which will be to Europe what Parliament
is to England, the Diet to Germany, and the Legislative Assembly to France.
A day will come when a cannon will be a museum-piece, as instruments
of torture are today. And we will be amazed to think that these things
once existed!
A day will come when we shall see those two immense groups, the United
States of America and the United States of Europe, facing one another,
stretching out their hands across the sea, exchanging their products, their
arts, their works of genius, clearing up the globe, making deserts fruitful,
ameliorating creation under the eyes of the Creator, and joining together,
to reap the well-being of all, these two infinite forces, the fraternity
of men and the power of God."
--Victor Hugo, Opening address, Peace Congress (1849-08-21)
The three sections of the piece reflect the three paragraphs of this text:
The opening shows an idea in the inner voices which is supposed to emerge
above the others: the first instance in the second violins, the second one
in the violas. Follows a passage which contains dissonances (bullets and
bombs) and a varied version of the opening is presented, to dissolve that,
in effect "replacing" the dissonant context by a more consonant one.
The middle section highly contrasts with the opening. The melody consists
mostly of harmonic tones whereas the other voices adopt a repetitive texture
and the tonality is shifted to D minor (homonym tonality). The music then
evolves to the Dorian mode (a thing of the past) before returning smoothly
to a tonal construction. Isn't it amazing these things (modes) once
existed?
The final section is a
fugato on a subject derived from the opening one.
We are back to D major but the subject and the answer will flow from one
voice to another, mimicking the exchanges between the two states. The
episodes are not contrapuntal however and so this is not a strict fugal
development. Instead the first few bars of the American Anthem and of the
European Anthem are used, to illustrate that the exchanges are made between
America and Europe. The final
stretto is the "joining together" leading
to the pure harmonic conclusion of the piece.
Innovation: this is the first time I introduce a modal component in my
work (D dorian modulating to A dorian). Until now, I have written things that
were exclusively tonal. I do not count the bar change from C to 3/4 as
innovation because it is purely incidental to the use of the American
Anthem here.
For the American Anthem, I retained only the soprano and bass from the
original, the inner voices are mine. Likewise for the European Anthem, the
middle voice is mine and not Beethoven's. I hope the Master will forgive me.
You can find the PDF, the MIDI and the MP3 realization here:
Index of /music/competitions/june-2008
Keep in mind the free software I use (LilyPond) is not able to insert realization
of ornamentation in the MIDI. Sorry.