CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. ANAÏS NIN (2009-10) [38.48] DE STAAT (1972-76) [36.16] 1. Artaud [5.06] 10. Beginning [3.26] 2. Allendy [5.34] 11. Choir 1 [17.49] 3. I await my father [4.52] 12. Choir 2 [11.15] 4. Father story [4.40] 13. Choir 3 [3.46] 5. The seduction [7.01] LONDON SINFONIETTA 6. Strange days [3.45] SYNERGY VOCALS SOUND INTERMEDIA sound projection 7. The seventh day [1.54] DAVID ATHERTON conductor 8. Henry was tired [4.05] TOTAL TIMINGS: [75.02] 9. Basque song [1.51] CRISTINA ZAVALLONI soprano www.signumrecords.com LONDON SINFONIETTA UK premiere of London Sinfonietta co-commission with Accademia Musicale Chigiana, supported by the London Sinfonietta Pioneers Generously supported by Music Center The Netherlands, The Royal Netherlands Embassy and Société Gavigniès Anaïs Nin ©Copyright 2010 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd De Staat ©Copyright 1994 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd Recorded live in concert at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, 14 April 2011. Engineered & Produced by Ian Dearden of Sound Intermedia. Design - Darren Rumney P2011 Signum C2011 Signum 24 1 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. Anaïs Nin (2009-10) “I await my father with deep joy and impatience. American diary author became famous, mainly because of her sexual frankness. After some research it emerged that she was the composer’s daughter. Much later still I Tomorrow, tomorrow, begins another romance!” realised that she had had a love affair with her father. Anaïs Nin After many years’ intensive collaboration with the Italian artist Cristina Zavalloni I Anaïs Nin is a monodrama, a musical stage play for one voice (Cristina Zavalloni), an realised that the role of Anaïs Nin would suit her very well. Meanwhile the volume of ensemble of eight on-stage musicians, without conductor, and projected film fragments. Anaïs’ diaries about her relationship with her father had been published unabridged in English under the title Incest. The voice, Anaïs Nin, sings of her love affair with her father, Joaquín Nin, whom she encounters again after 20 years’ absence, and of her lovers René Allendy, Antonin A few years ago two of my best friends, Gerard Bouwhuis and Heleen Hulst, Artaud and Henry Miller. They are given expressive voice, both in the film clips and founded a new ensemble, Nieuw Amsterdams Peil (‘New Amsterdam Water Level’) on tape, by the singer Hans Buhrs. with outstanding soloists who had decided to perform 20th and 21st century music for small ensembles (up to 12 players) without a conductor. All this prepared the As the piece begins we see Anaïs Nin and Antonin Artaud taking a romantic walk. ground for me to compose Anaïs Nin. Reading the diaries from the years 1932 to On the stage she sings of her ‘night of ecstasy’ with him. Anaïs Nin sings of her affair 1934 I learned that this father was only one lover amongst several. This led to my with her psychiatrist René Allendy, and of Artaud’s criticism of her behaviour. decision to give three of them a stage role: the French film actor, poet and playwright Artaud: “What have you done to Allendy? You have harmed him.” Antonin Artaud; Henry Miller, the American alcoholic whom Anaïs Nin turned into a Anaïs Nin then sings of her renewed encounter with her father (film clips). She is writer; and René Allendy. Under psycho-medical treatment himself, Artaud soon interrupted by a furious Henry Miller, but continues the story of her relationship with discovered Anaïs’ erotic hunger and advised her to consult his psychiatrist. Not long Joaquín. After a dramatic climax, she fantasises in a letter to her father about a afterwards Allendy was added to Nin’s tally of lovers. moment of great peace in which he is sitting on his bed. Later, in the room where My choice of instruments was influenced by the era when the selected diary extracts were Henry Miller is sleeping, Anaïs sings of her loneliness and her never-ending hunger. written, namely the early 1930s. This explains the use of saxophones, clarinets (Sidney As the piece ends, a 1930s’ gramophone recording of Joaquín Nin’s arrangement of Bechet, Coleman Hawkins) and percussion (drumset including a hi-hat and guiro). a Basque Christmas carol is heard from the stage. The music closely tracks the irony, despair and passion of this brilliant, many-sided I knew about the father before I heard about the daughter because my father’s sheet woman. music collection contained piano pieces and a volume of Spanish songs by the then © Louis Andriessen famous pianist and composer Joaquín Nin. A few years later, during the sixties, an Translated by Richard Wigmore 3 23 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. De Staat (1972-76) country would the government take the time and trouble to spend thirty hours discussing my plays with me?” I wrote De Staat (The Republic) as a contribution to the discussion about the place of music in politics. To keep the issues straight it is necessary to differentiate De Staat has nothing to do with Greek music, except perhaps for the use of oboes between three aspects of the social phenomenon called music: 1. Its conception and harps and for the fact that the entire work is based on tetrachords, groups of (devising and planning by the composer), 2. Its production (performance) and 3. Its four notes, which also explains the scoring for the groups of four. consumption. Production and consumption are by definition if not political then at Just before the final choral section the orchestra splits into two identical halves, as least social. The situation is more intricate when it comes to the actual composing. announced earlier in the work. They play two melodies which sound like one because Many composers feel that the act of composing is “suprasocial”. I don’t agree. How their rhythms are complementary (the performers play one after the other). you arrange your musical material, what you do with it, the techniques you use, the Polyrhythm is introduced for the first time in the coda following the choral finale, with instruments you score for, all of this is determined to a large extent by your own the two orchestras each playing their own separate score. But this time they have social circumstances, your education, environment and listening experience, and the the same melody, a canon. Finally, in the last bars, they attain the homophony availability – or non-availability – of symphony orchestras and government grants. introduced shortly after the opening choral section. I regard this as the major subject The only point on which I agree with the liberal idealists is that abstract musical of the work. material – pitch, duration and rhythm – is suprasocial: it is part of nature. There is no such thing as a fascist dominant seventh. The moment the musical material is © Louis Andriessen ordered, however, it becomes culture and, as such, a given social fact. I decided to draw upon Plato to illustrate what I mean. Everyone sees the absurdity of Plato’s statement that the Mixolydian mode should be banned because of its damaging effect on the development of character. It is equally clear that he was confusing the issue in wanting to ban dulcimers and the craftsmen who made them from his ideal state. What he wished to ban was the social effect of the music played on them, something similar perhaps to the “demoralising nature” of the Rolling Stones’ concerts. My second reason for writing De Staat is in direct contradiction to the first. Perhaps I regret the fact that Plato was wrong: if only it were true that musical innovation represented a danger to the State! When Bertolt Brecht returned to Europe after the war he chose to settle in East Germany. The first play he wrote there was censored by the party. But Brecht said to the assembled Western journalists, “In what Western 4 5 45 291.0mm x 169.5mm CTP Template: CD_DPS1 COLOURS Compact Disc Booklet: Double Page Spread CYAN MAGENTA Customer YELLOW Catalogue No. BLACK Job Title Page Nos. ANAÏS NIN Anaïs Nin Song Libretto p. 118 Artaud – the face of my hallucinations. The hallucinated eyes. The sharpness, the pain-carved features. The man-dreamer, innocent and diabolical, frail, nervous. Antonin Artaud p. 119 “Je suis le plus malade de tous les surrealistes.” p.393 Plusieurs choses nous rapprochent terriblement, mais une surtout: notre silence. Vous avez le même silence que moi. Et vous êtes la seule personne devant (“I am the sickest of all the surrealists”) qui mon propre silence ne m’ait pas gêné. Vous avez un silence véhément où l’on p. 192 I was haunted by Artaud. dirait que l’on sent passer des essences, je le sens étrangement vivant, comme une trappe ouverte sur un gouffre, où l’on sentirait le murmure silencieux et secret de la p.193 I met Artaud at the Viking. I was trembling. And then began a night of ecstasy. terre. Il n’y a pas de poésie inutile et fabriquée dans tout ce que je vous raconte, We left the café, we walked in a dream, in a frenzy, Artaud torturing himself with mad d’ailleurs vous le sentez bien. talk about eternity, God.