ID#: 883

Orphist Miniatures (2024) ; 6:00

by Nicolas Chuaqui

Ithaca College

This piece was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum for the 2024-25 exhibition Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930. Each of the two movements of this piece was inspired by an artwork and a musical work contemporary to the artwork that relates to it in multiple ways. The first movement, Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten (“I feel air from another planet”), connects Wassily Kandinsky’s Improvisation No. 28 with Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2; my work draws on pitches, gestures, and timbres from the last movement of Schoenberg’s quartet, which sets Stefan George’s poem Entrückung for soprano soloist. Through frequency shifting, delay lines, and spatialization, my work evokes the imaginative and striking worlds painted by Schoenberg and Kandinsky. The second movement, Le Tango de Pierrot (beginning at 2:40), blends Darius Milhaud’s Le Tango des Fratellini with Alexander Archipenko’s sculpture Carrousel Pierrot. In my work, Milhaud’s tango is manipulated to depict Pierrot’s character as a sad clown and observer of the human condition, and to evoke the form of Archipenko’s work.