Rəsiliəncə
Symphonic poem in E very major. Film by Deepesch Vasudev and Tejas Ewing.
- Duration: 19'
- Composed in 2020
- First performance: 01.10.20 online
- ISMN: 979-0-9016548-4-6
- Parts: To purchase the score, please email <rc@robertcasteels.com>
- Recording: resiliencelive.strikingly.com
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Downloadable scores for inspection:
In July 2020 Robert Casteels conceived a digital project entitled ¿Rəsiliəncə! that was funded by the National Arts Council, Singapore under the scheme: Digital Presentation Grant for the Arts. ¿Rəsiliəncə! sonically and visually echoes our individual responses to the sanitary, ontological and teleological crisis of COVID-19 that has affected all of us worldwide. Resilience refers to our capacity to recover from difficulties and to our mental elasticity to spring back into new shapes. The fundamental message of this project is that resilience within the safety net of a strong social cohesion enables us to overcome the onslaught of a massive crisis that was damaging the very fabric of our lives. Hence, the inverted ? mark before and the !mark after this project’s title ¿Rəsiliəncə!
Unintentionally ἑβδομηκοντάκις and ¿Rəsiliəncə! continue Casteels’s symphony nr 5 Veneris Transitus Symphoniae opus 87 in 2012 with the homophonic and homorythmic idea of De Profundis calls, the Varesian concept of interpolations, the tension between introspection and extraspection. More than ever, the staccato note, death, is the ultimate reduction of the infinite legato, life. The MIDI orchestra of ¿Rəsiliəncə! consists of seven-part choral voices and the following seven quintets: percussion (bells, crotales, vibraphone, triangle and timpani), woodwinds (piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon), brass (trumpet, tenor and bass trombone, horn and tuba), five violins, five violas, five celli and five contrabasses. This MIDI orchestral sound was submitted to sound sculpting, that is electro-acoustic contamination and detuning by 19 cents. The musical language of ¿Rəsiliəncə! consists of one melody that undergoes increasing degrees of sonic infections and intervallic deformations, a pentatonic and an hexatonic mode, the monochordal supratonalities of E Very Major and g sharp relatively minor, colotomic signals, trochaic punctuation, terraced dynamics, rhythmic palindromes and four storms.