First in a set of "picturesques" for varied combinations of bowed chordophones (string instruments). A tenebrous, lugubrious study in counterpoint and developmental variation scored for string trio (violin/viola/violoncello, all "con sordino" or with mute throughout). This "war dance" opens with a resigned yet belligerent ostinato exploiting the roughness of the lower two of the violoncello's open strings. As the piece proceeds, this ostinato figure assumes motivic significance, undergoing transposition and modification, passing between instruments in a textural and timbral tonal game. In the third measure, the viola enters with a suspension, soon revealing itself as a descending, then sensuously winding melodic line, a motive subsidiary to violin's serpentine octatonic melody that emerges a measure later. Throughout the work, the violin's winding octatonic melody, often in combination with the consequent wedge-like melodic figure played tremolando, dominates the process of developmental transformation that pervades work as a whole. Nevertheless, the "tail" of the viola's secondary melody, with its whole-tone scale characteristics, provides immediate contrast to the perilous octatonicism of the primary melody. The lengthy central development section, consisting of several distinct episodes that nonetheless flow into each other, employ a wide variety of compositional and performance techniques, embracing both lyrical and percussive qualities of the instrumental trio, at times crossing over the thresholds of polytonality and outright atonality. With the subsiding of the near-catastrophic climax of a pizzicato fugato, a modified recapitulation of part of the development appears, preparing a coda in which the despondent cantilena of the viola introduces an explosively ascendant line that cadences on a "Lydian tonic" with its unmistakeably ethereal quality. The painting in the video is "Death Offers Crowns to the Winner of the Tournament" by Gustave Moreau. You may read through the full engraved score here.

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