For flute, bassoon and piano
Sometimes a word is all that is needed to summon up music. In dwelling upon the word innocence so many thoughts and images seem to flow. In the realm of music the composer has been touched by the innocent intent of the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, who from the mid seventies experienced a vision that he had come from the star Sirius. In the composer’s imagination, for beings from the planets of the Sirius system, ‘everything is music, or the art of co-ordination and harmony of vibrations . . . The art is very highly developed there, and every composition on Sirius is related to the rhythms of nature . . . the seasons, the rhythms of the stars.’
So much of Stockhausen’s output, since his contemporary mystery play Sirius, has been composed for close friends and members of his family. He has made numerous intricate and often playful chamber works featuring wind and brass instruments as an extension of the human voice and physical gesture. This Trio for flute, bassoon and piano titled Innocence occupies something akin to this body of Stockhausen’s musical work, but carries with it no programme or narrative. It is written with the simplest of intentions: that the music might display and embody something of that innocence found in dreams and visions of the natural world.
The Trio consists of three sections titled Innocente, Danzare and Si Lamento. The sections are to be played as a single and continuous movement although having very distinct characteristics in tempo and compass of each instrumental voice. As in Stockhausen’s In Freundschaft the play of registers is all-important. In Innocence a musical section may have high flute and low bassoon with a piano texture in the sounding space between. Much of the music is conceived in a six-part harmony of voices, one each for the woodwind and four for the piano.
The music was composed during April 2015 for the Meltemi Ensemble: Joanna Lewis (flute), David Baker (bassoon) and John Truss (piano). For further information about this new ensemble, see the next page.
It is dedicated to the memory of Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 – 2007).
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