Matthijs van Dijk: (rage) rage against the (Signum Quartet)

Описание: Live from the Library of Congress series in Washington, D.C.

MATTHIJS VAN DIJK: (rage) rage against the
 
About the Composer
 
Born into a musical family, Matthijs van Dijk studied at the South African College of Music in his native Cape Town, where he won the Priaulx Rainier Prize for Composition in 2003. Since then, he has amassed an extensive catalogue of chamber and orchestral works—including a number of scores for film and television—that reflect his eclectic musical sensibility, which embraces everything from classical to rock and electronic dance music. He is a founding member of the Night Light Collective, which aims to create “a new platform for art and noise music, that is bound to stretch audience members’ ears.”
 
About the Work
 
A crucial turning point in van Dijk’s career came in 2009, when he took a master class in New York with Missy Mazzoli, a rising star of the “indie classical” world. “You say that you include elements of rock and metal in your music, but I don’t hear it,” Mazzoli told him. Van Dijk realized that he had been muting that side of his personality out of a perception that “popular music has often been looked down upon by many academics and classical musicians.” Disenchanted with “the art/classical music scene,” he veered off in a new direction, as represented by his 2018 quartet movement (rage) rage against the.
 
A Closer Listen
 
Van Dijk once characterized his compositional style as the “love child of Mahler and Shostakovich, if they hooked up in a rock and roll bar.” In (rage) rage against the, which takes its truncated title from Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night,” he juxtaposes the existential bleakness of Shostakovich with the electronically distorted “punch and grind” of heavy metal. The music builds to an intense, chaotic climax—perhaps an aural image of Thomas’s “wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight”—before flickering out in a final “dying of the light.”
—Harry Haskell, from https://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar...


While the Coolidge Auditorium was undergoing repairs, the Signum Quartet performed at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, just down the road from the Library.

For more information, visit https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-11081