Charles Uzor - Quartets/Quintet (2007)

Tracklist:
"a chantar m'er de so q'ieu no voldria …"
for clarinet, string quartet, and tape (2004-2005)
[01] 16:20 I allegro con brio
[02] 04:13 II a chantar m'er de so q'ieu no voldria …"
[03] 07:25 III capriccioso e tranquillo
Wolfgang Meyer, clarinet
Carmina Quartett

Shakespeare's Sonnet 65
for string quartet and tape (2001-2002)
[04] 15:36 I
[05] 03:02 II allegro con brio
[06] 04:39 III capriccioso e tranquillo
Carmina Quartett
Esther Uhland/James Aston, speakers

"qui ainsi me refait … veoir seulement et oïr"
for guitar quartet
[07] 10:11 I
[08] 11:18 II
Gitarrenensemble quasi fantasia

In all three pieces – the Guitar Quartet, the String Quartet, and the Clarinet Quintet – the melody is the comforting hand that was perhaps the oasis of calm for Saint Augustine. Just as his perception, shaken by the collision with the ego, wandered back to the content of perception, Machaut’s melodies wander to me, and perhaps back again, more melodic mass than quotation, more parody than arrangement. Sometimes they are pulverized, smuggled through their spectra, or “sung through” using traditional procedures of permutation – inversion, retrograde, augmentation, diminution. Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time has occupied me for twenty-five years.
Husserl’s greatest error was perhaps the most fruitful one: the tone is not the slowest thing that decays; its parts decay at different speeds. It is not only impossible to perceive a melody phenomenologically: the tone itself is an illusion. Its parts are the whole, up to the regress. With this difference between a remembered melody and one perceived now, between melody, tone, and tonal spectra – a difference that signifies nothing other than an aesthetic weighting and tendency – I set off on my search.
Charles Uzor