Description
Instrumentation: ensemble (sextet)
Edition: score
Year: 1998
Difficulty: advanced
A colourful piece: Semanterion – Toaca by Carmen Maria Carneci melts sounds of a gong into the piano and heavy crashes of a hammer are softened into tones of the violin. The Rumanian composer who conducted the first performance herself has worked out relations between elements of sound and rhythm with cleverness: the listeners find themselves involved into to deja-ententu feelings again and again. (Tagesanzeiger 7.11.98)
The composition seems well and logically structured and stylizes the sound of a plectrum guard which is common in greek-orthodox church, […] a thrilling and intense piece of music. (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 7.11.98)
“In the orthodox ritual the “call-signals” of the bell board (called in Greek: semanterion and in Romanian: toaca) – a pattern of rhythms with an accelerando in the beginning, a ralentando in the end and repeated sequences with irregular accents in between – are followed, as the ceremony demands, by the chime of the church bells.
This piece expresses neither nostalgia after folklore-like motifs, nor the intention to revitalize the interest for orthodox rituals. I only followed some musical ideas that I had drawn out of a tradition reservoir (such as the complementariness of these two worship instruments) in order to embody them in a non-traditional architecture, with an open horizon of signification. As regarding its form, SEMANTERION-Toaca is a sort of affresco (wall paintings) with four large pictures presenting stages from the metamorphoses of characteristic aspects of the two instruments.”
Carmen M. Cârneci
