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Musical Zodiac: Makrokosmos I & II

℗ 2018 Fabio Alvarez

Released on: 2018-11-17 Orpheus Classical

I, 1. Primeval Sounds (Genesis I) Cancer
[Darkly mysterious]

“Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse”

The title and format of my Makrokosmos reflect my admiration for two great 20th century composers of piano music – Béla Bartók and Claude Debussy. I was thinking, of course, of Bartók´s Mikrokosmos and Debussy´s 24 Preludes. However, these are purely external associations, and I suspect that the “spiritual impulse” of my music is more akin to the darker side of Chopin, and even to the child-like fantasy of Schumann.
And then there is always the question of the “larger world” of concepts and ideas which influence the evolution of a composer´s language. While composing Makrokosmos, I was aware of certain recurrent haunting images. At times quite vivid, at times vague and almost subliminal, these images seemed to coalesce around the following several ideas (given in no logical sequence, since there is none): the “magical properties” of music; the problem of the origin of evil; the “timelessness” if of time; a sense of the profound ironies of life (so beautifully expressed in the music of Mozart and Mahler); the haunting words of Pascal: “Le silence éternel des espaces infinis m´effraie” (“The eternal silence of infinite space terrifies me”); and these few lines of Rilke: “Und in den Nächten fállt die schwere Erde aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit. Wir alle fallen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen halt” (And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We are falling. And yet there is One who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands”).
Each of the twelve “fantasy-pieces” is associated with a different sign of the zodiac and with the initials of a person born under that sign.

George Crumb, Makrokosmos Volume I Notes

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