Miserere
Sound study on the ‘Qui tollis’ from Mozart's Mass in C minor, K. 427/417a
VISION OF THE WORK
Sound study on the ‘Qui tollis’ from Mozart’s Mass in C minor, K. 427/417a
At first, everything in me resisted: a new orchestral work with an audible reference to Mozart! When using quotations, the artistic difficulty lies in creating islands of quotation. The following must not happen: the composer writes his music, and at the beginning or end or in the middle of it, fragments of the quoted work appear. Once the listener has grasped this, they constantly wait for the next sound of the quotation and perceive the whole “rest” as nothing more than a maelstrom of the familiar. I have listened to Mozart frequently in my life: much that I once loved and may love again, and some that I will probably always love. The latter includes the Qui tollis from the Gloria of the Mass in C minor, K. 427/417a. Ever since I first heard this music, it has burrowed deep into me and remains there to this day. When I decided to compose Miserere, I knew immediately that I wanted to work with one or two musical models from the Qui tollis. As I said, I have listened to and played Mozart frequently, but it was something new to work with material from one of his compositions – a different quality of closeness than when listening or playing. I suddenly felt as if I were inside his head, experiencing 200-year-old musical material as brand new, just invented, just heard, just written down, applied, developed, welded and woven together. It became my own material with the same eternally new problem: where does it come from and where am I taking it? So I was inside his head and perhaps further away than ever before.