infotext:
In all three pieces, guitar quartet, string quartet and clarinet quintet, the melody is the comforting hand that was perhaps the oasis of peace for St. Augustine. Just as his perception, shaken by the collision with the ego, wandered back to the content of perception, the melodies migrate from Machaut to me and perhaps back - more melodic mass than quotation, more parody than adaptation. Sometimes they are pulverized, passed through their spectra, or "sung" using the conventional procedures of permutation - reversal, cancer, enlargement, compression.
Husserl's phenomenology of the inner consciousness of time has occupied me for 25 years. His greatest error was perhaps the most fertile: sound is not the slowest thing to pass away, its parts pass away unequally quickly. Not only is it impossible to perceive a melody phenomenologically: the tone itself is an illusion. Its parts are the whole, up to recourse. With this difference between remembered and now perceived melody, between melody, tone and the tone spectra, a difference that means nothing more than an aesthetic weighting and inclination, I went on the search.
Charles Uzor
program:
“a chantar m'er de so q'ieu no voldria…”
for clarinet, string quartet and tape (2004-2005)
[01] 16:20 I allegro con brio
[02] 04:13 II a chantar m'er de so q'ieu no voldria…”
[03] 07:25 III capriccioso e tranquillo
Wolfgang Meyer, clarinet
Carmina Quartet
Shakespeare's Sonnet 65
for string quartet and tape (2001-2002)
[04] 15:36 I
[05] 03:02 II allegro con brio
[06] 04:39 III capriccioso e tranquillo
Carmina Quartet
Esther Uhland/James Aston, voice actors
“Quie ainsi me refait… veoir seulement et oïr”
for guitar quartet
[07] 10:11 I
[08] 11:18 II
Guitar ensemble quasi fantasia
total: 72:54
Press:
03/04.2010
01.2008
03.2008
05.11.2007
Charles Uzor composer from Africa
“a chantar m'er de so q'ieu no voldria”
"Shakespeare's Sonnet 65"
“Qui ainsi me refait… veoir seulement et oir”
Wolfgang Meyer, clarinet
Esther Uhland, James Aston, Narrator
Carmina Quartet
Guitar ensemble quasi fantasia
NEOS 10714
“It's impossible to grasp all of this” - with these admiringly meant words, Wolfgang Meyer, soloist of Charles Uzor's quintet for clarinet, string quartet and tape, concludes his booklet text on the music of this highly talented black African composer. In fact, it's hard to believe how confidently this artist, born in Nigeria in 1961, has a wide range of cultural, historical and current styles; how he weaves them into consistent works with a peculiar, often mysterious tone, without any thought of cheap eclecticism.
Disturbing and fascinating at the same time
Uzor, who came to Switzerland at the age of seven during the Biafran War, first studied in Rome, Bern and Zurich, then received his concert diploma as an oboist and his master's degree in composition at the University of London. Having long been fascinated by a key text in Husserl's phenomenology, he completed a dissertation on the connection between melody and inner time consciousness after his return to Switzerland. The linear moment also plays a central role in Charles Uzor's highly vital music. So in the clarinet quintet “a chantar m'er de so q'ieu no voldria…” (2004 – 2005), whose title (“I will sing what I never wanted to sing”) goes back to a cantus by Beatrix de Dia the love song of a southern French, so-called “Trobairitz” of the late Middle Ages. The birdcry-like sounds in the second movement, which are said to come from a Papuan initiation rite, are both disturbing and fascinating.
clear vision
Uzor, whose diverse oeuvre also includes theater works, orchestral works and choral music, enjoys working with painters, poets and choreographers. His main interest is currently in smaller-scale works. In addition to the almost suggestive clarinet quintet, his CD, which has now been released on the NEOS label, contains a musical exegesis of William Shakespeare's sixty-fifth sonnet: a seemingly paradoxical dance around aspects of transience, to which the beautiful is also given. With clever commitment and a clear vision, the four musicians of the Carmina Quartet navigate complex rhythm fields, glissando zones and modally toned landscapes of harmony. The hallucinatory echo chambers that repeatedly open up in the two-movement guitar quartet “qui ainsi me refait... veoir seulement oïr”, in which the tones of a ballad by Guillaume de Machaut linger, are also intangible and cannot be fathomed. In the second movement, space and time seem to dissolve, because in the “normal mood” instruments retuned to a sixth tone ratio play sounds that shake the last security. You can hear and see... all of this is beyond comprehension.
Helmut Rohm
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