William Blank: Monologues

William Blank: Monologues

William BLANK: Après Cris for Solo Piano – Fragments No. 3 for Solo Violin – Chords for Solo Accordion – Gegen for Solo Viola: No. 1 – Gegen for Solo Viola: No. 2 – Gegen for Solo Viola: No. 3 – Refrain for Solo Harp – Lightnings for Solo Piano.

Gilles Grimaître, Piano
Mira Wang, Violin
Fanny Vicens, Accordion
Geneviève Strosser, Viola
Letizia Belmondo, Harp

“The music of William Blank – an essential figure in Swiss contemporary creation alongside his elder Heinz Holliger and his contemporary Michael Jarrell – is performed all over the world. In his work, there are few, if any, ethereal textures, chance elements, or improvisation. Instead, there is a kind of human-faced pointillism, a meticulous love of detail behind which emotion emerges in harsh flashes or compact outbursts.”

Damien Pousset, Outhere Music

Wikipedia

Except for my piece Gegen, written for solo viola – a radical work, important in my creative way – composing pieces for solo instruments (without accompaniment) has not really been a privileged area of expression or experimentation for me. It is simply that at certain times, the need has been felt to leave ensemble music for a while in order to (re)think the relevance of certain elements of language or to seek new avenues of formal organization: depriving oneself of the sonic seductions offered by the large orchestra or giving up the contrapuntal complexity that underlies writing for string quartet, for example, is indeed an essential experience.

The pieces performed here (and which surround Gegen) can therefore be seen as simple milestones that have both marked my questions about the future of my work and allowed me to continue it.

In addition, the commission for the interpretation competitions represented the opportunity to also question myself on the place that I wanted to give to the notion of virtuosity and the way of considering it and then representing it.

Composed between 1989 and 2014, they outline certain paths and detours taken by my mind over the course of a quarter of a century and offer, as their only coherence, the fact of having been written as close as possible to my conscience in the need to maintain the fact of thinking about music in a time when the concepts of ephemeral art, performance, sound installations and improvisation are gradually replacing writing.

Randomly, in the form of short fragments, sometimes characterized by muffled sounds produced by erasers placed between certain low strings of the piano. Then a second chord appears; more ample, it allows a form of development that leads to a climax. Finally, the chorale is gradually absorbed by increasingly dominant motivic reappearances until its final disappearance, which reveals, through the play of selective resonances, the central chord of the cadence of Cris.

William Blank

VEL1746 Booklet.pdf