Performed by the string quartet of the Ensemble Klangforum on July 2nd, 2014, at Ligeti Saal, Mumuth, Graz.
Program Notes
The corruptive dimension of the reconstructive nature of memory serves as a formal model for the unraveling of the present work. Recent neuroscience research coraborates early twentieth century views on memory as a dynamic and evolving phenomenon:
remembering is not a simple retrieval of past events. Memory stores only fragments of the past that later serve for the mental reconstruction of past events, which are susceptible to various kinds of biases and distortions, as well as selective and elaborative processes.
In Quasi (ébauche) the original formative ideas are constantly recalled in a series of reconstructions of the past in constantly present contexts, having at times more fidelity—and at times growing less similar—to the original experience. These reconstructions, by means of pitch gene recombinations, leave only memory vestiges of the original by constantly shifting, diffusing, distorting, transforming, omitting or adding events according to a model of retention/corruption.
It is, in other words, like drawing “on the elements and gist of the past, and extract, recombine and reassemble them into imaginary events that never occurred in that exact form,…not to preserve the past but to adapt it so as to enrich and manipulate the present.’’ It is all about what is remembered and how it is remembered…
Like this:
Like Loading...
The performance took place on October 10th, 2014 at the Conrad Prebys Music Center of the University of California, San Diego.
