Threnody (pronounced thren-uh-dee)
(1) A poem,
speech, or song of lamentation for the dead; a dirge or funeral
song.
(2) Any song or poem of lament (now an unfashionable use).
1615–1625:
From the Ancient Greek the construct being θρηνῳδία ((thrēn)ōidía), (lamentation) + ᾠδή (-ōid(ḗ)) (song).
The Greek ōidḗ was ultimately from the primitive Indo-European
root hweyd- (to sing) and was the
source also of “ode”, “tragedy”, “comedy”, “parody”, “melody” & “rhapsody”. The Greek θρῆνος (thrênos) (wailing) is often translated
as “dirge”, the distinction perhaps of technical value to anthropologists of
music. The form in the New Latin was thrēnōdia. The (rare) alternative spelling was threnedy and the commonly used synonyms
included dirge, coronach, lament & elegy.
Threnody & threnodist are nouns, threnodial & threnodic are
adjectives and threnodially is an adverb; the noun plural is threnodies.
Although
in the modern era music migrates effortless and instantly from one place to
another, historically musical forms varied greatly between cultures but it
seems songs of lament or other compositions used at funerals or in memory of
the dead must have been close to a universal feature of all societies. Of course not all used the same musical
devices to denote mournfulness or summon the mood of sadness but it seems in
some way to have been an essential part of the ritual. Even in those cultures where the mood was
less one of sadness and more a marking of a transition from one world to the
next, some music was a part of the process.
The Greek-derived word "threnody" spread to a number of European languages
and in some cases their colonial empires including the Bulgarian погреба́лна
пе́сен (pogrebálna pésen), the Finnish
surulaulu, the German Threnodie, the Hungarian gyászdal, gyászének, gyászköltemény, kesergő
& elégia, the Japanese 悲歌 (hika)
& 哀歌 (aika),
the Latin nenia (feminine) & threnus (masculine), the Macedonian
ре́дба (rédba), та́жалка (tážalka), по́гребна пе́сна (pógrebna pésna), the Norwegian Bokmål klagesang & Norwegian Nynorsk klagesong, the Polish tren, the Portuguese trenodia, the Russian эле́гия (elégija) & погреба́льная пе́снь (pogrebálʹnaja
pésnʹ), the Serbo-Croatian елегија, жалопојка, the Spanish
treno & canto fúnebre and the Vietnamese bài điếu.
Confessions
of a Broken Heart was a lament and there was a time when it would have been
regarded as a threnody because, as a synonym of elegy, it underwent the
same extension of meaning. Strictly
speaking an elegy or threnody was a song or poem of mourning but because the
ancient metre of such pieces was elegiacs, so named on that account, over time
all that was written in elegiacs came to be called an elegy (and thus a
threnody) and that extended to any short poem (regardless of the metre use) of
the subjective kind (ie an expression of the author’s feelings). As poetry has passed from a mass audience into the
hands of critics, academics and a handful of dedicated readers, the original
senses have been restored so threnodies & elegies are now again understood
as works of mourning, the former particularly a wailing ode, song, hymn or poem
of mourning composed or performed as a memorial to the dead.
An avant-garde piece, the work was originally called 8’37” (the duration of the
performance) because length of the sound events of the piece are given in
seconds, rather than the eighth notes of conventional notation, one of the
several experimental aspects in the score which uses a variety of unorthodox notations
to indicate how the music should be played.
As the title indicates, it’s a political piece but it was originally purely
an experiment with musical ideas, an attempt to “develop a new musical language” and an example of sonorism (a Polish school of composition),
focusing on texture, timbre & articulation to permit musicians some degree
of “expressivity” in the use of their instruments. Echoing a sentiment many twentieth century
experimental composers would express, Penderecki admitted that for some time
before any notes were written, “It
existed only in my imagination, in a somewhat abstract way” and if was only
when he heard it performed he was “…struck by the emotional charge of the
work...” and was moved to dedicate it to the victims of the atomic bomb dropped
on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945. He thought his score “both solemn and catastrophic” and in 1964 wrote: “Let the Threnody express my firm belief that
the sacrifice of Hiroshima will never be forgotten and lost.” The political purpose of the threnody was
encapsulated in the thoughts on nuclear weapons expressed in 1954 by General Dwight
Eisenhower (1890-1969; US president 1953-1961) when the National Security
Council suggested the French be assisted in Vietnam by use of A-Bombs: “You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those
awful things against the Asians for the second time in ten years. My God.”
The musical legacy however was perhaps more notable. So obvious was the emotional power the piece exerted it was used in a number of horror films including William Friedkin’s (1935–2023) The Exorcist (1973) and its motifs influenced a number of the European bands which experimented with the possibilities of electronic instrumentation in the 1970s and beyond, most notably the Berlin-based Tangerine Dream. The unconventional string ensemble assembled (24 violins, ten violas, ten cellos, and eight double basses) was manipulated to produce tone clusters, faster and slower vibratos, slapping, playing on the tailpiece and behind the bridge; while the sound durations are dictated precisely in seconds, other aspects of the music are discordantly aleatoric, allowing the players a choice of techniques, the implication being no two performances would be quite the same to an extent beyond the differences extracted by one conductor or another. Curiously, there are discrepancies between the events of that day in 1945 and the musical structure. It’s suggested for example one of the early cacophonies of clusters was to suggest the screaming of residents as they look up and see the bomber above, knowing they’d be bombed, but not knowing the appallingly new nature of the horror they were about to experience. In fact, the USAAF (US Army Air Force) had for some time been making over-flights to accustom the population to the sight of a Boeing B-29 (which the city's residents dubbed the "B san") and convince them there was no need to seek shelter. This was the first use of the A-Bomb as a weapon and as well as a military-cum-political mission, it was also an experiment in nuclear ballistics, the planners wanting to know the effectiveness (ie the casualty-rate & death-toll) when used against an un-sheltered urban population.
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