"Desert" for Shakuhachi & Orchestra - Ramon Humet

Spanish National Orchestra conducted by Paolo Bressan. Horacio Curti as the shakuhachi soloist.

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"Desert" was composed between 2017-18 as a commission from the Spanish National Orchestra, on the occasion of the commemoration of the bicentennial of the Prado Museum. It was premiered 14 June of 2019 in the National Auditorium of Music of Madrid with the Spanish National orchestra conducted y Paolo Bressan, with Horacio Curti as the shakuhachi soloist.

The desert is the ecosystem where the anchorites developed their life of prayer in communion with the Whole. A vacant space, with wide, open horizons, where loneliness is a source of knowledge and a reason for detachment from temporal affairs. The engraving Anchorite by the Spanish artist Mariano Fortuny y Marsal presents a powerful image of nature, with a sky that heralds an imminent storm, where the anchorite is located on his back, in the background, contemplating with humility the panorama. This masterpiece is one of the sources of inspiration for Desert, for amplified shakuhachi and orchestra.

There is something rustic about the desert prayer life that ties directly into the music for shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute once blown by pilgrim monks of the Fuke Zen Buddhist sect. An austere instrument, without any added device or mechanism, only with five holes and a perfectly carved bezel, a simplicity of construction that provides a range of sonic colors that is extraordinarily rich in nuances: full and full-bodied timbres, sounds of air, a certain inharmonicity on the spectrum, a lot of flexibility in pitch modification with remarkable glissandi possibilities and an interesting tradition (the melodies of the corpus koten honkyoku) of overwhelming melodic beauty.

There is something rustic about the desert prayer life that ties directly into the music for shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute once blown by pilgrim monks of the Fuke Zen Buddhist sect. An austere instrument, without any added device or mechanism, only with five holes and a perfectly carved bezel, a simplicity of construction that provides a range of sonic colors that is extraordinarily rich in nuances: full and full-bodied timbres, sounds of air, a certain inharmonicity on the spectrum, a lot of flexibility in pitch modification with remarkable glissandi possibilities and an interesting tradition (the melodies of the corpus koten honkyoku) of overwhelming melodic beauty.

Musical contexts as divergent as the symphonic orchestra and the shakuhachi come together in this same work. Western instruments have achieved significant rhythmic precision in performance. The shakuhachi, and specifically the honkyoku genre, goes through less measured parameters, with the ma (a concept that can be translated as "the space that needs a sound to exist"), an idea rooted in traditional Japanese arts and related to a global (non-linear) view of time. For this reason, the soloist part is composed with the technique of "space notation", very close to the philosophical conception of time of honkyoku, while the orchestral part is structured with the usual western meter.

Far from wanting to color the silence, an arsenal of different musical elements that represent the vastness of the desert: dialectical struggle between soloist and orchestra, acoustic magma, cutting cubist planes, process of loss of pulsation, circular birdsong, harmonic sweeps, irregular iteration of a repetitive motif, etc, are opposed to the void of the naked sound of the shakuhachi. The duality between orchestral musical phenomena and the stripping of the soloist evolves until it dissolves into a final motif, of an innocent nature, that collects and unites the two worldviews.

The orchestral colour has various peculiarities depending on the presence and absence of some instruments. The presence of two piccolo flutes enhances melodic gestures. The absence of oboes and flutes gives more prominence to the soloist. The absence of horns and tympani allows for a general timbre far removed from the conventional sound of the classical orchestra and, on the other hand, the use of trombones and two different-sized bass drums with notable capacity for timbral modulation is enhanced. Also noteworthy is the use of wooden percussion that creates an energetic articulation counterpoint complementary to the penetrating phrasing of the shakuhachi, preserving a rustic, atavistic, primitive expression.

The cadenza constitutes the culminating point in the evolution of the two worlds: the desert and the hermit, to concur at the conclusion of the work, where a minimalist theme is repeated circularly with minimal metric variations, alternating with the shadow of the sound of bamboo. The repetition of the theme dissolves in the unique sound of the shakuhachi, which exhales the last notes in the high register to transform into air, in silence.

Picture: "Shakuhachi Player" by the Japanese painter Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Source: https://bit.ly/3jLvXth