Time stretch (on Gesualdo)

Despite his name, Bruno Mantovani is a young French composer (born in 1974). Here I present Time Stretch (on Gesualdo), a 2006 orchestral composition.

Composer's note:

Time Stretch (on Gesualdo) takes as its starting point one of the madrigals from the Italian composer's 5th book, “S'io non miro non moro”.
From this short piece for 5 voices, I extracted a harmonic framework of 130 chords, which I reworked by eliminating all elements that were not significant for listening (mainly octaves), and then I "stretched" it. This grid over the entire length of the piece creates a harmonic path from which I composed.
If the tensions arising from Gesualdo's chromatic language are perceptible in this piece, it is absolutely not a "pastiche" or a quotation, but an original work where the reference is only present in the background.
Regardless of the harmonic structure, "Time Stretch" refers to the dramaturgical issues that are always present in me: the search for constant energy, radical contrasts, continuous transitions between conflicting episodes, but the discourse is unified by the omnipresence of rhythmic periodicity, of pulsations that create a sense of order within a rhapsodic music.

Back