infotext:
In all three pieces, guitar quartet, string quartet and clarinet quintet, the melody is the comforting hand that was perhaps the oasis of calm for Saint Augustine. As his perception, shattered by the impact with the ego, wandered back to the perceptual content, so do the melodies of Machaut wander to me and perhaps back – more melodic mass than quotation, more parody than adaptation. Sometimes they are pulverized, sifted through their spectra, or "sung off" with the usual procedures of permutation - inversion, 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
“qui 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
"All this is unbelievable" - with these admiringly meant words Wolfgang Meyer, soloist of the quintet for clarinet, string quartet and tape by Charles Uzor, closes his booklet text on the music of this highly talented black African composer. In fact: it is unbelievable how confidently this artist, born in Nigeria in 1961, manages a wide variety of cultural, historical and current styles; how he weaves them into consistent works with a peculiar tone that often touches on the mysterious without having to think about cheap eclecticism.
Disturbing and fascinating at the same time
Uzor, who came to Switzerland as a seven-year-old during the Biafra War, first studied in Rome, Bern and Zurich, before earning his concert diploma as an oboist and his master's degree in composition at the University of London. Long fascinated by a key text of Husserl's phenomenology, after his return to Switzerland he completed a dissertation on the connection between melody and inner consciousness of time. The linear element 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), the title of which (“I will sing what I would never have wanted to sing”) goes back to a cantus by Beatrix de Dia, so the minnesong of a southern French, so-called “Trobairitz” of the late Middle Ages. Disturbing and fascinating at the same time are the screeching bird sounds in the second movement, which are said to come from a Papuan initiation rite.
clear vision
Uzor, whose already diverse oeuvre also includes theater works, orchestral works and choral music, enjoys working with painters, poets and choreographers. His main interest at the moment is in works with smaller ensembles. In addition to the downright 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 beauty is also entrusted. With clever commitment and clear vision, the four musicians of the Carmina Quartet traverse complex fields of rhythm, glissando zones and modal landscapes of harmony. The hallucinatory echo chambers that keep opening 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 elusive and unfathomable. In the second movement, space and time seem to melt away, because the “normal tuning” is played by instruments tuned in sixth tones that make the last certainties falter. One may hear and see … none of this can be grasped.
Helmut Rohm
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