FALLING INTO NOW
Perspectives on the guitar from the 20th century to the present
Seven radically different ideas of what the guitar can be — each once claiming its own present, each falling into now.
Spanning almost a century, Falling into Now brings together music by Fernande Peyrot, Philippe Leroux, Hans Werner Henze, Tristan Murail, Luciano Berio, Fausto Romitelli and Tara Jovana Valkonen.
Rather than tracing a linear history of the guitar, the programme sets contrasting ideas of sound, virtuosity, form and instrumental identity against one another. Heard side by side, these works reveal the 20th and 21st centuries not as a single development, but as a field of competing presents.
The guitar itself becomes an object of exploratory compositional thinking: historical at one moment, radically reinvented at the next.
PROGRAMME
Fernande Peyrot — Préludes
Philippe Leroux — Histoires anciennes
Hans Werner Henze — Royal Winter Music
Tristan Murail — Tellur
Luciano Berio — Sequenza XI
Fausto Romitelli — Coralli
Tara Jovana Valkonen — Bells of Ilion
COMPETING PRESENTS
The programme does not treat musical history as a sequence in which one language simply replaces another. Each work proposes its own present: a particular understanding of the instrument, of sound and of what virtuosity might mean.
Placed next to one another, these different presents remain active at the same time. History becomes less a chronology than a field of possibilities — all of them falling into now.