Teho Teardo

Ellipses dans l’harmonie – Light in the dark

This music was the result of an invitation to visit the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation archive: “I was asked if I was interested in writing music inspired by a particular text, or by some other book in the collection […]. Then, quite by chance, I happened on a first edition of L’Encyclopédie by Diderot and d’Alembert, a cornerstone of ‘illuminism’ – enlightenment. The Encyclopédie contains various scores, not written as exercises or compositions, but as examples of how to write counterpoint, or a cadenza, or how to work with harmony.  In other words, it is a sort of three-century sample book that no-one has ever used so far.  As I was not interested in a purely philological operation, I decided to record all the scores in the Encyclopédie, collecting them in a sound file, and later on to write music with these rules in mind.” (Theo Teardo).
Ellipses dans l’harmonie is meant not only as a tribute to the Encyclopédie, but also as a ‘political’ link with the spirit of the Enlightenment, which guided the birth of opera, and comes in useful today as a need for light when faced with new obscurantism.