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BOchum

DOrtmund

Essen

HERne

Bochum | Thursday
NOVEMBER :: 17th · 05
Schauspielhaus | Kammerspiele

20.15 h

‘You certainly know what you want,’ exclaimed Pierre Boulez during a master class in 1995, impressed with student composer Robin De Raaff’s Opus 1, the string quartet “Athomus”. The French ‘grand old man’ of composition praised his younger colleague’s individualistic, consistent musical language and his feeling for sound colour.

The work “Athomus” (1993) represents an early stage in De Raaff’s essentially fractal composition technique. The title is taken from “Liber de musica”, a treatise by the theoretician Johannes Vetulus de Anagnia written around 1350. In his treatise Vetulus assigns an absolute time value to individual note values, relating them to the smallest division of a calendar day, the ‘athomus’. In De Raaff’s string quartet the ‘athomus’ represents a zero point of musical parameters, an extreme reduction of note length and interval size that functions as a germ cell for the compositional process. The steady beginning unfolds into a process of contrapuntal and rhythmic agility. After a time the calm of the beginning returns, only to be disrupted once again. Although derivatives of the ‘athomus’ appear throughout the work, the compositional germ is restated in its actual form only at the very end.

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