ARTIST
STATEMENT:
“Bright Sadness is my first work of more serious music composition…it came out of a personal need for empathy, or at least a means of expression in the wake of war and endless suffering around the world. The only adequate role model I could find was that of my great-great aunt who suffered at the hands of the Communists in a small village in the Carpathian Mountains in the 1930’s. Her brother and family were shot and left to die in the middle of the village road, while she had to run away with her other siblings, hiding in the forest, surviving for many seasons on crumbs of cornmeal scattered on the village path. Her only response was to say “Lord shine your light on those who do evil to us in this world.” In the face of suffering, she admonished to bless, to turn the other cheek, and to find joy.
Written as a suite for solo cello and accompaniment (contrabass, string quartet, mixed voices and tenor sopilka), the work explores two distinct emotions within human experience - joy and sadness.
Form
- Approach:
To capture this paradoxical dilemma, Bright Sadness, I used two seemingly different tonalities to explore the spectrum between two fundamental states:
…TRIAD
(Major and Minor)…
Both Slavic folk music and Eastern sacred choral music rely heavily on major and minor triadic structure. There is rarely a case of dissonance, or atonality, not ultimately resolved in the reference tone. As such, I used the major and minor triads as a root for all melodic and harmonic development in my work. They serve as both a reflection of my desire for simple complexity/complex simplicity within my musical development, and of my fundamental love of the triad as a full expression of beauty in music. The triad is complete. It lacks nothing. It is both simple and full.
Cello - the instrument for exploration. Melodic vessel.
Three Voices - the personification of the triad. Sacred symbol.
Sopilka – a wooden wind instrument as diatonic cue and folkloric symbol
String Quintet – the provision harmonic progressions to support the exploration of melodies
The cello is the soul, which carries us on this journey through a suite of spring songs, laments and dances. There is never one particular state within which the cello finds itself. The pieces are much like the cycles of life, complete in themselves yet interlinked by the common themes and journey through which the cello travels. There is no grand narrative in a traditional sense, but rather, a river with multiple streams of interconnected moments and experiences. Much like the ebb and flow that exists within the cycles of nature, the work reflects ‘life’ as it oscillates between two primary emotional states, joy and sadness, and as it produces a new experience. The work draws its inspirations from various sacred and folkloric motifs of the Carpathian and Eastern Orthodox traditions.
Life is paradox. Therefore, Bright Sadness emerged as
a metaphor for that which I experience as life.”
Oleksa Lozowchuk