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PROMS LISTENING SERVICE Radio 3’S Tom Service Proposes Onward Sonic Explorations Inspired by the Music of Tonight’S Prom

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PROMS LISTENING SERVICE Radio 3’S Tom Service Proposes Onward Sonic Explorations Inspired by the Music of Tonight’S Prom THE PROMS LISTENING SERVICE Radio 3’s Tom Service proposes onward sonic explorations inspired by the music of tonight’s Prom REBEL PASCAL DUSAPIN edges of artistic and musical possibility, it’s a Le cahos Outscape common idea that music can take us to other worlds, that it can transport us out of our That crunching dissonance at the start of This piece, Pascal Dusapin’s second cello everyday consciousness into another realm Rebel’s invocation of chaos is an abrasive concerto, melts and melds the solo line of transcendence. The shamans of Siberia or masterstroke. And it rhymes throughout into the textures of the orchestra so that South-East Asia use music in their rituals as musical history with other composers’ the cellist’s line is amplified, echoed and a bridge between worlds; the American depictions of a primordial soup of musical transfigured by the musicians behind her. composer La Monte Young makes every atoms upon which harmonic and rhythmic That’s a common conceit for today’s note he writes a realisation of musical magic order is at last imposed through the force composers, who often reject the apparently – listen to the five hours of The Well-Tuned of compositional will. That’s what happens divisive rhetoric of concertos that instead pit Piano to discover how a solo piano can in the opening movement of Haydn’s The their soloists against the massed musicians become a sonic magic carpet to a place of Creation, another journey from harmonic behind them in a musical face-off in which meditative yet physical bliss. If you haven’t got instability to musical common sense; it’s there can be only one winner. So here a spare day to listen to La Monte, listen and even what happens in the first movement of instead are three concertos that do just that: bliss out to Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The problem that cast their soloist against the orchestra Air for 18 and a half minutes; if you’ve only for pre-20th-century composers is that they in a battle for musical bragging rights. Who time for one song, The Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the were duty-bound to show that from all that wins? You decide … Sky with Diamonds’ is a psychedelic miniature chaos came stability, order and the laws of The pianist in Elliott Carter’s Piano Concerto that will take you there, too … musical harmony, a realisation of this best is suffocated by dense clouds of dissonance of all possible worlds that God – and from the orchestra, against which the piano Enlightenment Man – had created. It took has to fight for its musical survival. Similarly, much later composers to embrace and in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto the embody a chaos that remains chaotic soloist has to wrestle the orchestra to the throughout a piece of music: like György ground – metaphorically speaking – in a Ligeti’s Désordre, the first of hisÉtudes for battle of virtuosic wills; and, while Dvo∑ák’s piano, a spiralling whirl of fractally anarchic Cello Concerto is more congenial than those musical elements that spin further and further two, any cello soloist has to find a way to out of control. Iannis Xenakis made music make their instrument sing and sound and from the laws that govern the untameable soar over the orchestral mass against which phenomena of the natural world – flocks they must compete to be heard. One for all? of birds in flight, the motion of fluids, gases One against all, more like. and stars – listen to Keqrops for piano and orchestra for a blast of Xenakis at his most BERLIOZ elemental; and Edgard Varèse’s orchestral work Amériques celebrates the sonic viscera Symphonie fantastique Join Tom Service on his musical odyssey in The Listening of early-20th-century life, revelling in rather A terrifying vision of expanded musical Service on BBC Radio 3, Sundays at 5.00pm, from consciousness, formed in the crucible of 3 September. Go to The Listening Service on the Radio 3 than resolving the chaos. website to hear clips, watch animations, download previous Berlioz’s desperate, opium-fuelled pursuit episodes and listen to the Proms Listening Service playlist. of the actress Harriet Smithson. Whether it’s through the stimulus of substances or Visit the Proms website extreme emotions, or exploring the outer for articles and more from the Proms Listening Service..
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