Strange
Energy
for
chamber ensemble and optional tape and visuals
O power of
the divine fire,
O strange energy…
You who dwell,
Christ my
God, in light wholly unapproachable,
How in your
essence totally
divine do you mingle yourself with grass?
-St.
Symeon "The New
Theologian" (10th century)
12 minutes
Excerpt: sound
score (pdf)
performed
by Radius Ensemble
The
concept of the simultaneous immanence
and transcendence of God has posed a tantalizing theological and
philosophical
problem for many of the West’s greatest minds. How can the
God who created black holes also hold every blade of grass in his
infinite
love? How can that same God listen to every prayer from every human
soul?
And how can that eternally blameless and ineffable Energy deign to
manifest
Himself in human form – and in a human who experienced torture and
death
at the hands of beings created by his Father?
Strange
Energy is a meditation upon
these questions. The act of meditating is in part an act of
recontextualization: of taking an idea, image, word – or even one’s
whole
life – and trying to understand it by fundamentally questioning the way
we have understood it in the past. We can perhaps approach
the questions above by learning to fathom how different God’s
perspective
on the universe is from ours, and how differences which seem so great
to
us – a black hole, a blade of grass – may not be for our Creator.
Thus, the guiding metaphor structuring
Strange
Energy is that of the recontextualization of the ordinary, but to
do
so in order to show the universal connectedeness of all of
us.
The concert experience in the Western tradition serves in many ways to
divide, not unite, and thus Strange Energy represents an attempt to
undermine
that sad reality. Thus, I have asked that the performers
surround
the audience, placing them literally in the center of the music-making
experience. In addition, the performers not only play their
instruments
– skills which separate them from the listeners - but also
whisper,
whistle, and blow on glass bottles – activities that all of us can
do.
The close-up photographs of the flowers confront us with the intricate
beauty that surrounds all of us daily, but which most of us take for
granted
– and which none of us (artists or not) can fully recreate.
   
Photographs
by Laura Kjeldgaard
Case
Strange Energy is a
quiet piece
meant to allow for reflection and contemplation. The musical form
of is heavily ritualized in that the same sequence of events happens
four
times, and though the pitches and timbres change, the duration of each
stays the same. This results in a large-scale predictability that
underscores the eternal nature of the piece’s main question.
Additional Information
Strange Energy was
premiered by
Radius Ensemble, with Delvyn Case, conducting, in April 2005 on Eastern
Nazarene College's Musica Eclectica Concert Series.
Instrumentation (click here
for a detailed preface including setup diagram)
Flute (doubling piccolo)
Bass Clarinet
Violin
Cello
Piano
Percussion
Optional tape
Optional visuals
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