Max Grafe

Flute, Bassoon, Trumpet, Trombone, Piano, 2 Violins, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass

Composer's Note:

ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.
"” Andre Breton, Manifeste du Surrealisme, 1924

La grue des sables is the second in a series of works in response to the paintings of Yves Tanguy (1900-1955), an early adopter of Andre Breton's ethos of surrealism. Unlike his contemporaries such as Salvador Dalí and Giorgio de Chirico, whose visual languages make use of recognizable objects in distorted forms or bizarre situations, Tanguy's paintings are composed almost entirely of abstract images, though depicted in a realistic manner so as to appear strangely familiar at first glance. To reflect this, my musical responses to his works are cast in a broadly esoteric language, but peppered with fleeting, oblique references to more conventional tropes and gestures.
Furthermore, in an effort to engage with the artworks in question more deeply than simply creating a musical simulacrum of their visual styles, I decided early on that the structure of each piece would be heavily informed by my own experience of looking at the painting over time. In this way I was able to circumvent the apparent paradox of translating a fundamentally spatial/ visual medium (such as painting) into a fundamentally temporal/aural medium (such as music). This work's eponymous painting depicts a bizarre, ungainly construct"”true to Tanguy's style, displaying sharply incongruous elements of both the organic and the synthetic"”against a background of diaphanous smudges of white paint. In my brief musical study of the painting, I sought to capture its delicate balances between seemingly opposing elements; ugliness and beauty, stasis and motion, angularity and fluidity. La grue des sables was composed for the Tanglewood Music Center and was completed on July 15, 2016 in Pittsfield, MA.