gerelateerde werken
Carve the Runes : for cello / Rens Tienstra
Genre:
Kamermuziek
Subgenre:
Cello
Bezetting:
vc
Solo Song for Viola : Ten Lines / Ig Henneman
Genre:
Kamermuziek
Subgenre:
Altviool
Bezetting:
vla
Elegy : for viola / Ali Authman
Genre:
Kamermuziek
Subgenre:
Altviool
Bezetting:
vla
Three sad dances : for two violas, 1954 / Rob du Bois
Genre:
Kamermuziek
Subgenre:
Altviool
Bezetting:
2vla
compositie
Pleurants (Meditations on the Dijon Mourners) : for viola / Rens Tienstra
Overige auteurs:
Tienstra, Rens
(Componist)
Toelichting:
Pleurants (‘weepers’) are anonymous sculpted figures representing mourners, used to decorate elaborate tomb monuments, mostly in the late Middle Ages in Western Europe. On the Continent they are especially a feature of the tombs of Franco-Burgundian royalty, imitated by some grand nobles.
The inspiration for the current piece for viola solo came from one group of pleurants in particular: the so-called ‘Mourners of Dijon’. These mourners, part of an iconographical tradition led by the Haarlem-born artist Claus Sluter, stand sixteen inches high and originally occupied niches around the tombs of Philip the Bold, his son John the Fearless, and John's wife, Margaret of Bavaria. Their original location was Champmol, the Carthusian monastery in Dijon. There are statues of priests, monks, members of the ducal household, choirboys – all demonstrating their grief and pain most eloquently, some with eyes turned toward the heavens, others wiping their tears on their sleeves, some enveloped entirely in drapery. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga described the tomb as the “most profound expression of mourning known in art, a funeral march in stone.”
The current piece for viola solo – an instrument reserved by many composers for their most elegiac expressions – sets this funeral march in motion, passing different participants that each keep the same plaintive song going in their own particular manner.
Rens Tienstra