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PROGRAM NOTE back to Program Notes Last modified 31 July 2024 Kokoro (1992) Solo Violin In his Zen and Japanese Culture, Daisets’ Suzuki writes: "'Kokoro' is a very comprehensive term. It first of all means the physical 'heart,' and then the true 'heart,' (connotative and emotional), 'mind' (intellectual), 'soul' (in the sense of an animating principle), and 'spirit' (metaphysical)." This delicious prolixity of implication was irresistible. When the opportunity of writing a large-scale composition for solo violin arose, I had recently completed a work for the Arditti Quartet (Visions). Its first movement concludes with an extended solo for the first violinist. Since it was Irvine Arditti who had arranged the commission with the aid of the British Arts Council, I took that solo as my source for the new work. The eighth of Kokoro's twelve sections ("ghostly, evanescent, elastic") is an approximation of the textual source, though decisively altered in character. The other sections are drawn from its materials also, but each by way of a radically transformative strategies, including algorithmic procedures. Five of the transformations manifest an aspect of the source: the second is spirit, the fourth the physical heart, the sixth the true heart, the tenth is the soul, and the last the mind. The others evoke related images ("a tenuous trembling," "a traversal of sighs," and "luminous murmurs," among them). I thought of the set as a collection of extreme and alternative worlds within which aspects of a common ancestorship emerge in sometimes perilous and always unpredictable succession. Kokoro is, of course, dedicated, affectionately, to Irvine Arditti. The work was premièred by him on 30 January 1993 at Le Botanique in Brussels. Writing to him subsequently about the recording, I said, “The most striking – indeed breathtaking – shift of mood that you achieve … is in the final bar, when an implacable fire melts – in a moment – into affective tenderness. If that kind of change could be managed between the 12 Sections, you would really have something (and, come to think of it, so would I).” – Roger Reynolds |