Alberto Posadas: Ubi sunt

On aesthetics

Investigations into the relationship between music and nature, music and mathematics characterize the work of Alberto Posadas, as well as the exploratory proximity to the instruments he uses. He developed the concept of »generative micro-instrumentation«: from the microscopically recorded sound material and the partially newly discovered playing possibilities of an instrument, the musical structure of the composition emerges

 

Ubi sunt

Ubi sunt is the inscription of an erotema, a philosophical question sentence, which became a prominent literary theme in medieval Europe. Its origin is found in the Bible, in the Book of Baruch, and passed through Latin poetry into the Romance languages (including Boethius, 5th century). The question Ubi sunt qui ante nos in hoc mundo fuere? (Where are those who were in the world before us?) addresses what can be called one of the last taboos of the Western world: Death and transience and their meaning in terms of the transcendence of life.

Welfare societies try not to talk about death or present it in sweetening and distancing terms. In the High Middle Ages, when the erotema, the question, became an important literary motif, the preoccupation with death was part of daily life and had a social dimension, not just a personal one. Phenomena such as the plague had an enormous impact on it. The current pandemic has brought us to a situation in which we have to deal, perhaps only marginally–perhaps not only–with the fact that our reality can no longer afford to continue to maintain taboos.

The pandemic thus also had an enormous influence on this composition. Ubi sunt qui ante nos in hoc mundo fuere? is a question with which the others become an alter ego of ourselves and the past finds itself in the present and future. And in fact, when we ask about those who were before us, we also ask about where we will be when we will no longer be. It is a question about our own death and transcendence that remains unanswered.

The texts chosen for this choral work are traditional Ubi sunt questions, poems by Novalis, Stefan George and Meister Eckhart, verses from the Gospel of Mark, an inscription on the crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Capuccini in Rome, and texts written for this composition.

The 24 voices are divided into two choirs, symmetrically placed on the stage. This makes it possible to create different relationships between them, ranging from one unit to 24-part sections. In the process, the sound shifts, like a spatial stereophony, circularly or as a contrast between the register of female and male voices.

With this piece I try to build a bridge between the present and the past, just as the Ubi sunt question does. The connection with the past is not only of a purely aesthetic nature. In a very concrete way, it also refers to forms and aspects of vocal music as they can be found in the repertoire of medieval music: in antiphons, accompanied recitatives, ritornellos, in polytextuality where different languages overlap (here: German, Spanish, Italian and English), or in psalmody.

(Alberto Posadas)