Music

Werken > Chamber music · strings > Three Dance Capriccios (2005)

The audioclips are from an audiophile recording of the first performance by BINAURAL. Information about this première is here on this site.
To order the score or the complete high end BINAURAL recording, please contact me.

The title Capriccios refers to the genre of the ‘caprice’ in 18th-century painting: an imaginary arrangement of celebrated ruins and monuments. So too these three pieces: rhythmical rearrangements and interpretations of historical dance forms.
The Pavane, opening with a call like an entrance from afar, slowly develops its original, stately rhythmic character, and from there acquires greater, almost tango-like fierceness.
The La Volta in triple time (a dance considered by Arbeau in his Orchésographie from 1588 to be a kind of gaillarde, the fast dance to follow the pavane) moves between its original character, an erotic and intimate jumpdance, nineteenth-century walzer, and the twentieth-century milonga.
The Bransle de Mardiche is the ancient rounddance of that name with its refrain structure (and here in duple time, so bransle double), at the same time as Bartók’s fast kolomeika (in tempo giusto), moving intermittently towards the sound of the mbira and Afrocaribbean rhythms (Mardiche is a play on the 17th-century Mardijker, Dutch for the converted, liberated slaves, often of mestizoes).

This little suite is also a small sonata, with a major role for the anonymous 12th-century pastourelle ‘Volez vous que je vous chant’ (to be heard in various guises in the second movement). Asked by the knight after her parentage, the young lady discloses that she is of high birth: descended from the nightingale that chants in the high foliage.

The score examples below always comprise the first three pages of each movement:

Score examples

Click on an image to view it in full size.

Audio clips

Click on an audio clip to listen to it. A player will open in a pop-up window.

• 1-Pavane.mp3
• 2-LaVolta.mp3
• 3-Bransle.mp3