Symbol and Structure in the Quintet Cumpăna luminii by Doina Rotaru

DIANA-BEATRICE ANDRON Faculty of Composition, Musicology, Musical Pedagogy and Theatre

“George Enescu” University of Arts Iaşi Iaşi, Str. Horia, no 7-9, 700126

ROMANIA dianaandron2001@yahoo.com

Abstract: - In the second half of the twentieth century, musicians began to cultivate a new relationship with the oral tradition, discovering new structural and semantic meanings in what we used to call the archetypal, in response to the excesses of avant-garde movements. The composer Doina Rotaru is one of those creative personalities open to exploring the primordial , both in its primitive-ritualistic forms, as well as in its Byzantine-archaic forms. With a special inclination towards symbol and archetype, the composer shows a desire to semanticize the sound structure, to focalize the creative energies in the revelation of a symbol. This goal is achieved in the quintet Cumpăna luminii [The Balance of the Light], in which the essence of the spiritual ascent is embodied, through a great compositional gift , into a music whose message fundamentally revolves around this important archetypal symbol – the light. Imbued with a genuine spirit of monody, the compositional vision of Doina Rotaru brings together the most complex elements – from the modal complementarity and the strategy of the various timber distribution of sonorous material to the multi-polar descendent thought and the variational-improvisatory spiral – all converging towards the structural and symbolic meaning of “the balance of the light.” Key-Words: - symbol, archetype, structure, Doina Rotaru, glissando, ornamental, Cumpăna luminii, monody

The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century brought about a new communicational perspective, generating significant long term effects in terms of ideas, attitudes and cultural strategies.

The new relationship between global and local is also based on the principle of otherness, closely followed by that of diversity, which influences the change of many cultural paradigms that have proven to be very resistant in time.

Reacting to the excesses of the avant-garde movements in the second half of the 20th century, exhausted in often sterile experiments and radical individualized mannerisms, musicians everywhere began to cultivate a new relationship with the oral tradition, discovering new structural and semantic aspects in what we used to call the archetypal.

The symbol is able to capture the features of “the thing in itself.” On a practical level, this is possible through the signifier – the “visible” half of the symbol – that is, through gesture, graphics or sound.

The composer Doina Rotaru is one of those creative personalities open to exploring the primordial , both in its primitive-ritualistic forms, as well as in its Byzantine-archaic forms.

Irresistibly drawn to the ancient, ritualistic layers of the musical culture, Doina Rotaru consistently works with symbols and metaphors, focusing on the connotations of the word, without (explicit) translation in the denotative plane.

Basically, the composer intends to “recover” some key features of the endless music: the power of communication, the expressive power, the magic, practically following two evolutionary lines, which, at the same time, interfere and complement each other:

1. exploring the modal-generating structures and of the timber-instrumental universe;

2. exploring the semantic, quasi-programmatic dimension, involving mythical-symbolic relations.

A simple presentation of the composer’s archetypal vision, expressed in terms of universality of language and the recovery of the essential data of music, offers us an impressive “list” of edifying concepts: spectral music, heterophony, modalism, improvisation, pluridirectional time, minimalism and repetition, ritual and incantation, microcellular variant passage, the sound continuum principle, the principle of unity in

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diversity, antagonistic yin-yang dualities, the glissando, ornaments, microtonies, the complex sound, timber metamorphosis, and, last but not least, the “magic” of the flute, the composer’s favourite instrument.

The natural resonance of sound, accompaniment, unison, heterophony, texture, repetitive techniques are as many universally valid models, distinctive and, at the same time, unifying elements that constitute the backbone of her compositional conception.

Doina Rotaru has an inherent inclination towards symbol and archetype, and the titles of her works are clear guidelines in this regard.

The main „themes,” which could establish connections with ancient symbols, myths and legends can be summarized to a few: the origin of the world and the spirit of the primary elements (Simfonia a III-a – Spiritul elementelor [Symphony no. 3 – The Spirit of the Elements]/2004, L’Éternel Retour for 8 cellos/2000), the myth of the bird and ascension (Aripi de lumină [Wings of Light] for 24 flutse/2000), the theme of enlightenment and transcendence (Cumpăna luminii [The Balance of the Light] for clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano/1982, 5 Vitralii [ 5 Stained Glasses] for 24 flutes and magnetic tape/2000; Tempio di fumo for flute/1997), reflection of cosmic time and the time-timeless relationship (Quattrotempi for cello and percution/1995, Ceasuri I [Clocks I]/1987 and Ceasuri II [Clocks II]/1984 for chamber orchestra), sacred numbers (Troiţe [Triptych], trio for clarinet/sax. s, piano/synth. and percution/1990), the spiral (Uroboros for two flutes/1998, Spiralis I for guitar/1989, Spiralis II – Concerto no. 2 for flute(s) and orchestra/1991, Spiralis III for alto flute and guitar/1992), the circle (Cercuri magice [Magic Circles] – Concerto no. 3 for flute(s) and orchestra/1993), but also those belonging directly to mythology (Noaptea Sânzienelor [The Night of the Witches] for clarinet and magnetic tape), etc.

The desire to semanticize the sound structure by focusing the creative energies on revealing a symbol, often archetypal, places Doina Rotaru in the field of an actual “aesthetics of simulation.”

Dan Dediu devotes a special study to this phenomenon [1]. One of the fundamental premises from which the author starts is that “simulation means / ... / to achieve a specific musical imaginary equivalent to a certain reality. We cannot say for sure what is simulated from the essence of that reality, because the poetic imagination of the creator can reformulate the whole route of the sonorous thought and find unsuspected possibilities to capture it. In fact, the power of musical simulation is based

on the play between what is offered to the imagination (by means of auditory perception) and what the latter achieves, further on, on its own.” [2].

Starting from Doina Rotaru’s vision of the musical imaginary, the musicologist Gheorghe Duţică emphasized that “the stylistic unity inspired by Doina Rotaru’s music gives the impression that each work is nothing but a cut, a sample drawn from a perpetual becoming, from an eternal journey, which we join in for a time.” [3]

Let’s step further on “the steps of the light” to discover, along with Doina Rotaru, the essence of spiritual ascent, embodied by the composer in a music whose fundamental message revolves around this important archetypal symbol.

Light is the symbol of life, love, salvation and spiritual ascent.

The opposition light – darkness symbolizes the complementary or alternative values of an evolution. As a universal principle, this relationship is legitimized in all the deep layers of ancient civilizations.

In general, light and darkness represent a universal duality (Post tenebras lux – light follows darkness – in the order of cosmic manifestation, as well as in the interior enlightening).

According to some archetypal sources (in Genesis, but also in India and China), the cosmological morphogenesis involves a separation of darkness from the light, originally mixed. By consensus, the return to origins cannot be expressed except through the dissolution of the duality and the reconstruction of original unity.

In the Christian view, the symbolical meaning of light always accompanies life, salvation, happiness, bestowed by God, Who is Himself light. God’s law is the guiding light for the people; Jesus is the light of the world (John 8, 12, 9, 5); the believers must be, in turn, light (Matthew 5, 14), becoming a reflection of Christ’s light (Epistle II to the Corinthians 4, 6). Inspired by divine, we will all walk into the light.

Psychology and psychoanalysis have shown that the semantics of ascent includes the symbolism of light, as the ascent is linked together by bright images and an euphoric feeling, while the descent is associated with dark images accompanied by a feeling of fear.

The symbolic sphere of the light circumscribes the principle of good (as opposed to darkness, as the equivalent of evil). As an expression of the fertilizing Uranian forces, light is associated with the warmth that gives life. In other words, products of the fire that emits them, light and warmth are

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co-participating phenomena in the genesis of the living world.

Doina Rotaru’s compositional vision is imbued with a genuine spirit of monody, seen as an elevated symbiosis between melos, ethos and ethnos.

“The monodic discourse of Doina Rotaru – emphasizes Gheorghe Duţică – follows the multiplicative Oriental logic – it does not build through development, but by asymmetric free juxtaposition – and the integration of Romanian parlando-rubato spirit, in a complex writing where the ornamentation is revealed as the effect of an inner necessity. / ... / Far away from any decorative or purely colour rhetoric, the ornamentation plays a profound structural role, loaded, however, with a semantics derived organically from the symbolic functions of the complex sound, cultivated with ingenuity and admirable consistency by the composer.” [4]

In line with the timbre, the ornamentation becomes in Doina Rotaru’s vision a rich source of musical information; the apogees are used to enhance the sonorous attacks that precede them. Starting (in the spirit of André Jolivet) from the pivot-sound as a strategic landmark in building the monodic syntax, Doina Rotaru develops, in almost all her works, a timbre metamorphosis based on the most advanced concepts in the field of the musical sound.

Another phenomenon with archetypal value in Doina Rotaru’s creation is the glissando. Here too, the typological diversity in remarkable.

In the field of the monodic, glissando is, most often, manifested as an element of increase/decrease in the musical tension, by upward/downward slides at various tempered or untempered intervals.

The complementary dimension of the intonational level, rhythm is in turn a generative-formative element of the musical discourse, as the prevalence of the monodic thought favours that type of construction, in which variation supports the wide breath of the melodic arches.

In the quintet Cumpăna luminii [The Balance of the Light] – for clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano/1982 – the macrotemporal dimension circumscribes a process of stylistic self-definition through the use of the dynamics of a compositional project that is archetypal in essence. Doina Rotaru’s entire concept is based on the idea of bringing to the front of the architectural strategy the parametric constant, that defines each section of the cycle, as follows: height – Part I; duration – Part II; timbre – Part III a; intensity – Part IV.

In Part III of the work, the core of the correspondence relationship: symbol-structure is focused on the area of the complementarity phenomenon.

It is of utmost relevance that the light-darkness binomial dualism is reflected analogically in a combination of modes which, by a process-evolution fusion, will cover the chromatic integral modulo 12. Fig. 1 – Diagram of the modes

Thus, the symmetric mode [2:1] - M1 (tone-semitone), having a density of cardinal 8 and an enormous generative potential related, primarily, to the duality of the relation diatonic-chromatic, will receive the response of the symmetric mode [3, 3, 3] – M2, with a low density at cardinal 4, a structure that, despite its ambiguity, shall experience a spectacular evolution, towards the end of this part.

In Doina Rotaru’s case, the subtle character of perpetuating the cellular-motif detail, the refinement in the structuring of the variation-improvisation flow, the exceptional intuition of the timbre colour [5], the naturalness of the monodic expression represent, in general, a summum of qualities determined, undoubtedly, by the aura of her genuine compositional gift.

“Behind” this obvious quality is, however, a deeper plane, cleverly “hidden” as much as convincingly materialized, a plane personalized by the overt wish for sonorous in-carnation, seen as the long due bright embodiment of the musical idea.

This is why, in resonance with this thought, we decided to “disclose” the remarkable conceptual consistency in shaping this sonorous material, whose generative force resides precisely on the complementarity of the mentioned modes.

To this end, we subjected the entire monody to a bifunctional graphic symbolism, expressed in two geometric figures: rhombus and hexagon, whose meanings are highlighted by the upward, respectively downward, direction of the tailets.

Thus, all the notes to which we attached downward tailets belong to the [2:1] (M1) mode, while those to which we attached upward tailets

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belong to the [3, 3, 3] (M2) mode. In this order, the notes framed by rhombus (belonging to M1) and hexagon (belonging to M2) are pivot-notes, whereas the other have, as appropriate, the significance of bonding-notes and ornament-notes, respectively.

Fig. 2 – Cumpăna luminii [The Balance of the

Light], p. a III-a, monody of the clarinet.

As can be seen in the synoptic presentation of

Part III, Sections A – A’ indicate a maximum density of the [2:1] (M1) mode, while sections B and Coda, incline the distributive balance in favour of a complementary mode: [3, 3, 3] (M2).

But “the opposites” are kept in balance, in a “balance of the light,” that is located at the centre of an evolutionary process focused on a continual refinment of the sonorous minimal-aphoristic material, reduced to a few basic cells.

Among them, in a genuine symbolism of the shadow, the microstructures are included with the help of the bonding-notes and ornament-notes consistently invested with expansive-pressure virtues, derived from the “ubiquitous” action of the reversed chromatic formula (RCF) and the intervals of increased and decreased quart, decreased quint and decreased octave.

In this context, it is interesting to point out that the nucleic substance specific to Part III has matrix

attributes and is “strategically” disseminated throughout the entire opus. Moreover, the profile of some melodic microstructures frequently makes reference to intonational “idioms” established in the old area of various traditional musical cultures (Romanian and Japanese, in particular), which contributes by generalization (and generality!) to the construction of stylistic imprint of the composer.

Although the sonorous material is “poured” into a pluri-directional, non-pulsating temporal layer – as Doina Rotaru is a great master of monodic fluidization – the careful observation of the process of advancing on the succession axis displays in principle an architectural form connected to the tri-strophic archetype: A - A '- B (the bar type). Schema formei:

Probing into the deeper layers of monody we find, thanks to the flexibility and transparency of the variance passage, the morphological “arguments” and the syntactic markers of the overall shape.

Thus, section A contains the segments α (x + y), α1 (x1 + y1), β (z + z1), γ (w + w1 + w2) and k (cadence time); Section A’ (more concentrated) an extension of A, contains the segments: αv (xv + yv), αv1 (xv1 + yv1) and k (yv2 + yv3); section B – location of the modal mutation to M2 – juxtaposes the segments: δ (u + u1 + u1' + u2) and k, and the Coda, fulfils in a cadential-conclusive manner the entire part through what can be considered a variation of δ1 (u3 + u3' + u3'') [6].

From a global perspective, the joint connection of the pivot-sounds reveals an interesting multi-polar strategy, corresponding to an area of melodic elevation.

Before we specify their trajectory and content, we must mention a few important elements regarding the (possible) correspondences in the symbol-structure relationship.

First, the beginning of the monody in the acute register (re3), in piano, reported at the end in the middle register (mib1) has the direction of a macrotemporal descensio, a trajectory followed constantly throughout this part.

In symbolic key, the moments defined (incipit and finalis) – extreme sides of a thoroughly developed process – represent – on the line of the (complementary) high-low binomial – the

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archetypal-morphogenetic relationship between heaven and earth.

Secondly, beyond the ornamental-melismatic “shadows” and the quasi-tensioned interval connections – the heaven-earth dichotomy translates, in Cumpăna luminii [The Balance of the Light] (Part III), in the analogy celestial light-terrestrial light .

Indeed, the absence of radical contrasts (present in other works, as well as in Part II of the work in question) eliminates the possibility of identifying an antagonistic opposition light-darkness or celestial-terrestrial (underground). There is, therefore, a complementarity in the area of the pure light, filtered by the human concept/perception of “the downwards transcendence” (see Lucian Blaga - Spaţiul mioritic [The Mioritic Space]).

Returning to the structural bases that give consistency to this view, let us specify the data of the multi-polar strategy concerned.

Sections A – A’ describe the steps of a spiral evolution, constituting two volute-descensio, as follows:

Section A Pol 1/Re (sg. α) – Pol 5/Sib (sg. β) – Pol 3/Fa (sg. γ) – Pol 5/Sib (sg. k) Section A' Pol 1/Re (sg. αv + αv1) – Pol 4/Lab (sg. k)

Fig. 3 – Cumpăna luminii [The Balance of the Light], p. a III-a, sections A - A'

The fact that the 2/Mi b Pole is missing from this evolutionary multi-polar diagram is not accidental. It is reserved quasi-exclusively for section B, also covering the conclusive-cadential area of the entire part.

If each pole (pivot-sound) possesses, as we have seen, a certain area of elevation, displaying its force of moving centre of gravity –observe the network of adherent elements, from the category of the binding-sounds and ornament-sounds – no less interesting is the relationship (on the same branch of the symbolic and structural descent) of the polar extremities, both at section level, as well as at part level.

For Section A, the bipolar incipit-finalis relationship Pol 1/Re – Pol 5/Sib, circumscribes a consonance trajectory, of large downward third, while section A' , for the same type of relationship, builds – in the case of the report Pol 1/Re – Pol 4/Lab –a dissonant trajectory, on the pole-antipol axis, of downward increased quart.

From this perspective, we cannot overlook the fact that the inter-relationship in terms of the overall architecture of the five modal poles suggests the latent existence of a hemitonic pentatony of the type: re – mib – fa – lab – sib.

Given the composer’s propensity to identify archetypal binders amongst the Romanian and Far-Eastern traditional musical cultures, the presence of this structure is perfectly plausible.

Another interesting aspect concerns the context of the presence of the 2/Mi b Pole in sections B and Coda.

Fig. 4 – Cumpăna luminii [The Balance of the Light], p. a III-a, sections B – Coda

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As we have seen, it refers to the lower limit, the terminus point of the descent, the descent of the celestial light from the transcendental field in the human area of terrestrial.

This “descent” does not have pejorative connotations, however, “con-descending” or degrading. The descent of the light is a gift , a blessing and the stability of the 2/Mi b Pole, extended over the entire section B + Coda can only symbolize the “light” balance of the referential centre of gravity, this axis mundi, strengthened by the discreet but expansive oscillation to the perfect ascendant quart: sib – mib.

Is this oscillation – placed conclusively in the spirit of the well-known archetype of the “authentic” cadence – another aspect of “the balance of the light”? Certainly, all elements/arguments presented, from the modal complementarity and the premeditated-differentiated distribution of the sonorous material up to the multi-polar downward strategy and the variational-improvisation spiral of the macrotemporal evolution, converge to identify

the structural and symbolic meanings of “the balance of the light.” References:

[1] Dan Dediu, Estetica imaginarului muzical [Aesthetics of the Musical Imaginary], in: Radicalizare şi guerilla. Teorii, ipoteze şi proiecţii muzicale [Radicalization and Guerrilla. Theories, Hypotheses and Musical Projections], Bucharest, Ed. Muzicală, 2004, pp. 11-58. [2] Ibidem, p. 20. [3] Gheorghe Duţică, În căutarea ordinii arhetipale. Sincronism şi specificitate în creaţia compozitorilor români [In Search of the Archetypal Order. Synchronism and Specificity in the Creation of the Romanian Composers], manuscript [4] Gheorghe Duţică, in op. cit., pp. 42-57. [5] In this context we consider the polychromy of the emission, the diversity of the modes of approach in the clarinet score [6] See Fig. 3 and 4.

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