Description
Composer’s Note:
Composition as research into comparative cultural anthropology. Music as a discourse on the arousal of the passions, though itself unaroused and cold. Musical events ripped out of logical sequence and encountered randomly like the lakes, bridges, hills and pavilions in the Chinese landscape garden laid out in Cao Xuequin’s mid-18th century novel, “Dream of the Red Chamber”. The keyboard fantasies of C.P.E. Bach (1714-1788) as Romantic landscape in sound, realising in tones the chinoiserie ideals of the only major European architect to have visited imperial China: “the greatest part of the buildings are collected into one view … by their whimsical combinations, exhibiting the most magnificent confusion imaginable … Their artists knowing how powerfully contrast agitates the human mind, lose no opportunity of practising sudden transitions… Thus they conduct you … from places of horror to scenes of delight…” (Sir William Chambers (1726-1796), “A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening”, 1772)
