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about

Dragonflies Draw Flame
…myself it
speaks and spells,
Crying what I do is me-for that
I came.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame

This is music in which you’re cast into an open sea- orientation and hand-holds come gradually, and then only to the alert and intuitive. This is music that doesn’t contrive to mystify, but presents the secret, singular nature of its sounds; in this way, the music is so transparent, so self-enacting, as to initially seem slight, even unsubstantial. Enter and re-enter the environment of the piece and you regain and retool your senses and begin to perceive what’s on offer. The basic ground of the work owns an affinity with the spirit of some of the Wandelweiser composers- Manfred Werder chiefly-and in fact was co-composed by one of the collective’s preeminent members, Eva-Maria Houben. The Rodrigues’, père et fils, in collaboration with Ms. Houben, create environments to be inhabited; we, the listeners, are the creatures who feel quickened or startled or seduced. We’re invited to grasp the sounds, their flavor, their affect, their micro-pulses and heartbeats, their small power.
Rodrigues and Houben’s sound world doesn’t simply invite the listener’s participation and loosed imagination, it necessitates it. Its intermittent gusts of airy organ tones, fragile, scraped strings, micro-harmonies and waxing and waning cricket songs come to us in billows and soft choirs of pure sentience.
The 13th century philosopher Duns Scotus posited the idea of the haecceity of all things, a word meaning, simply, thisness. Haecceity insists everything owns an essence of its own that makes it what it is. The poet Hopkins embraced Scotus’ principle in his lines of verse; his word was inscape. Inscapes are the true nature of a thing, always dynamic, never static, always moving in and out of relation to the thisness of others. Such as we hear in the music of Houben and Rodrigues.
The haecceity of the sounds exist for the listener to assemble, connect, puzzle over. The haecceity of things offers no meaning-rather, it speaks and spells, cries and dissipates. Thisness in sound, the startlingly clear this, not-that quality, was expressed beautifully by composer Jürg Frey in a recent interview: “I treat my pitches and music carefully, with respect, and let them have their say. I have the idea they talk to me.”
Face it, we are dulled and deadened by the world’s relentless, intrusive noise. In psychic self-defense we filter and blinker our senses, making the approach to this music a gradual, layered one.
Dragonflies, wings in the sun, draw flame. Ernesto, Guilherme and Eva-Maria play. A music that restores the listener’s attunement to the haecceity of things is an act of generosity.

Jesse Goin, November 2018

credits

released December 26, 2018

Organ
Eva-Maria Houben (July 2018 at St. Thomas Morus Church, Krefeld)

Viola (BACH.Bogen)
Ernesto Rodrigues (October 2018, Berlin)

Viola d’Amore (BACH.Bogen)
Guilherme Rodrigues (October 2018, Berlin)

Field Recording
Guilherme Rodrigues (September 2018, Pico Island)

Mix
Guilherme Rodrigues

Master
Ernesto Rodrigues

Graphic design
Carlos Santos

Liner notes
Jesse Goin

Production
Ernesto Rodrigues

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Guilherme Rodrigues Berlin, Germany

Guilherme Rodrigues is a cellist, improviser and composer from Lisboa, Portugal.
He was born in 1988 in Lisboa and started to learn cello and trumpet when he was seven at Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa and later in Conservatório Nacional de Música de Lisboa to study classical and music theory until his twenty-three. With an intuitive approach to improvisation and exploration of the timbres... ... more

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