mantra tonight
wednesday november 4@arts on main
live 6pm till 9pm composer’s workshop:
MANTRA as formula and as process
LEADER: composer mokale koapeng
WITH: pianists jill richards + liza joubert
producer jean-pierre de la porte
MANTRA is probably the most influential piece of music of the last four decades. It allowed karlheinz stockhausen himself to move uniquely between intuitive, process-based music and more structured, notated music without losing the power of either. MANTRA is at the heart of wolfgang rihms fluent yet logical composing, it is a kit of parts for ‘new simplicity’ composers and a blueprint of karlheinz stockhausens own 27 hour long music theatre LICHT. MANTRA has had a shotgun effect on the way musical possibility is imagined and listing its effects on current music, whether acknowledged or not, would give it the same status as marcel duchamps LARGE GLASS or Picassos DEMOISELLES d’AVIGNON - not to know MANTRA is an irremediable handicap in understanding the present. This is why it is important for MANTRA to be performed many times and in many ways. It needs to enter the repertory of young pianists from where it immediately expands into a new way of hearing and performing bartok, schonberg, messiaen, nancarrow, stravinsky debussy webern boulez and the great jazz piano idioms –few if any compositions have so much power to reinvent their ancestors, to completely disturb and redistribute the 20 c canon and its performing traditions. This is also why composers of all genres need to invent music able to resonate in different ways with MANTRA – not because MANTRA is definitive- nothing is- but because it subtly yet fully translates so many of the objectives of 20 c composers and seems to present a violent and compellingly OTHER reading of ten decades of its- and our- precursors.
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