The Angel of History (2019) for orchestra
Program Note
This piece derives its name from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of H istory. Thesis IX is quoted in full below:
“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
This notion of a storm that plods along unceasingly and piles upon itself made me think of billows of sound which could function similarly. In my piece, the orchestra acts as a kind of resonant chamber from which continuous streams of droning sound flow. The musical material is simultaneously linear and cyclical; an extremely simple melody gives the piece a certain forward motion but the harmonic framework has a looping quality, unable to escape itself. Perhaps like the Angelus Novus, whose elevated perspective renders the whole of historical progress as a heap of wreckage, my piece is pushed forward by a ceaseless onslaught of sound that is always decaying yet growing in density.
Duration: 6 minutes. Instrumentation: 2(pic).2.2.2(cbn)/4.2.3.1/timp.2perc/hp/strings