CHORAL OUVERTURE
Year composed
1980
Duration
10 minutes
Scored for
Availability
4 (4=Picc). 4. 4(3=Picc.Cl.4= B.Cl.). 4(4= Cbsson). / 4. 4(4= Picc Tr.). 4. 1. / 4 Perc. Hp. 2 Kbd. / strings
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About
The Choral Ouverture was created on the initiative of maestro Lovro Matačić and the Zagreb Philharmonic, and was written in memory of Josip Slavenski, a composer whose personal understanding of tonal musical substance, by looking into the new, sublimated the sound of his own sources. It was premiered on FEB 8 1980, in Zagreb, with Zagreb Philharmonic, conductor: Lovro Matačić
Program notes
The title is borrowed from the vocabulary of Baroque music and was intended to define the path for transformations of a series of primary sound cells, the origins of which extend all the way to the ritual idiom. Thus conceived musical cores - also understood as musical patterns - are the result of my research for melodic-rhythmic features and determinants of folk musical heritage. I have been observing their sound characteristics, structural relationships, adaptions in different musical settings ... "Found" musical patterns, deprived of their applied function, peeled from the deposits of psychological subtext and reduced to a bare sound object, it was possible to bring them into mutual relations, and - thus - to establish different subconscious-mental connections between. That is the case for example, with the quasi-pentatonic melisma found in the tunes from Međimurje and folk "choral" singing on the northern Dalmatian islands. This served as a precondition for the compositional work, whose procedure - hinted at in the title - is identical to the baroque technique of permanent variation of the selected (Gregorian) chorale ...
Certain instrumental relations, a more prominent role of the organ, ways of shaping the sound sequence ... were the main guidelines for the composition.