Carson Kievman's "Nuts & Bolts" for piano was composed between 1992 and 1993. Both this piece and the contemporaneous Symphony No.3 ("hurricane") were written - as noted in the score - "as a response to having lived through, and been devastated by, one of the most extensive natural disasters of our time - the South Florida Hurricane of 1992". Following the spirit - and almost the letter - of an updated Sturm-und-Drang poetics, at the heart of both the Hurricane Symphony and "Nuts and Bolts" is the artistic and emotional exploration of the interplay between external forces and interior feelings, between actuality and imagery, catastrophe and trauma. In the Symphony, the unleashing of the hurricane moves in parallel with a psychological parabola - from hypnotic anticipation to panicked excitement to overwhelming paroxysm - which leads to awareness of (and surrender to) the beauty of natural forces as manifestations of an irresistible destiny. Similarly, the coexistence of dramatic, contemplative and descriptive elements lies at the core of "Nuts & Bolts", which represents a sort of chiaroscuro study vis-a-vis the timbric and textural fresco of the Symphony.
After eight introductory bars of lyrical stillness, the storm advances in cycles of progressive intensity. Tension builds up in long stretches of crescendo, only to burst suddenly and to restart again and again (a procedure somewhat reminiscent of the waves of "fuerza y luz" in the work by Luigi Nono, friend and mentor of Kievman). Furious toccata-like passages for the two hands seem to rotate in whirls around a point of static calm, an "eye of the storm" implied by the music but never explicitly admitted or represented.
To paraphrase Alban Berg, at the micro-structural level "Nuts & Bolts" can be thought of as an "invention" over a triplet. The ternary rhythmic pattern recurs obsessively throughout the score: already present in the figuration of the left hand in the initial eight bars and dramatically highlighted soon after in the series of repeated G-sharp's in diminuendo, triplets predominate in the writing for the right hand, either as filigrees separated by short silences, or joined in long cascades of virtuoso perpetual motion, or in counterpoint to the chromatic descents of the left hand. The meaning of the triplet as a constructive and expressive device is clarified at the very end of the composition, where the acceptance of natural devastation as a manifestation of fate is hinted by the perfectly recognizable quotation of the initial theme of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the "Destiny" motif formed precisely by three repeated notes and a falling third. The sardonic presence of the Destiny motto is continuously felt from bar 132 onward, even though the precise pitches heard at the outset of Beethoven's Fifth appear explicitly only in bars 140-141. "Nuts & Bolts" concludes with a mysterious sequence of triplets in diminuendo for the left hand, oscillating between F-sharp and F and slowly extinguishing into nothingness.
© Paolo
Pesenti 1999
Home