Seen from the Mediterranean countries where I live (France, Italy, Spain), Finland is a northern border with the unknown, a natural frontier of endless forests and lakes (and mosquitoes), which could be labeled “hic sunt dracones”. But that’s not why I have borrowed Roger Caillois‘ title At the Heart of the Fantastic; he has something slightly different in mind that I find fascinating: “Rather than what is admittedly fantastic, I seek what is insidiously fantastic, which often lies in the very heart of the fantastic […] as a displaced or foreign element: a secondary fantastic, a fantastic in relation to the fantastic”.
Three pieces of mine will be performed at the Tampere Biennale (and for that I am very grateful). Monte Altissimo, for string ensemble, was inspired by the quarries at Carrara, and Michelangelo’s visit to find the best white marble (“homogeneous, crystalline, like sugar”), he even dreamt of sculpting directly on the top of the mountain! I have carved my fantasy inside that of Michelangelo and sculpted him dreaming of sculpting a mountain. The music shows both the effort of the artist and the beauty of the material (evanescent flageolets), linked in an ascending spiral.
Blond vénitien, for cello solo, is a homage to Luigi Nono ; it portrays a moment of serenity, bathed in the orange afternoon sun at the Fondamente Nuove in Venice – a dock that faces the cemetery island of San Michele, where the Italian composer rests. Inspired by the baroque viola da gamba (and Nono’s sound world), the music is made of waves that remind the lagoon; as it climbs up in the harmonic series, the tuning becomes unstable, the timbre distorted, the rhythm fluid, then it unleashes its brutal potential. Surprise: the lagoon hides a monster.
I have described Contrapluma, for piano solo, as “a wild rewriting of an impromptu by Schubert, whose pearly cascades mingled in my head with a drawing by Dürer (Wing of a Blue Roller) […] the perfect balance between a jackhammer and Oscar Peterson’s jazz”, I don’t think I can do better. The piece was composed in reverse, as an entanglement of the many references I had chosen to invoke. A chiselled, aggressive pattern in the highest register of the piano progressively unfolds its hidden qualities: brilliant colours, kind harmonies, and groovy rhythms, which were always present, yet inaudible.
I believe that the three pieces match the theme of the Tampere Biennale, Worlds in Metamorphosis, not because they work as windows to different artistic worlds, but because they are not interested in asserting a reality; what Roger Caillois calls fantastic within the fantastic is a sort of transformation, a subversive interpretation of detail that changes everything…
But something is missing; I provide the mountains and the sunsets, the monsters and the birds (and occasionally the jackhammers) but they need to live in your imagination. No subversive listening will be done without your ears, and no metamorphosis will occur without your mind: the heart of the fantastic is the fantasy in the heart of the beholder.
Mikel Urquiza
Photo: Rui Camilo