Bernhard Lang

The Songs of Vala

for Linea Ensemble

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

(Ephesians, 6:12, King James version)

This new piece for Ensemble Linea and Columbian vocalist Johanna Vargas (^1stsoprano of Neue Vokalsolisten) is based on texts by William Blake, "Vala or the Four Zoas"; it is one of Blakes visionary, prophetic and mythological poems: The Death and Judgement of the Eternal Man;
here read as a prophecy of the Anthropocene and the fall of civilisation.

The composition is again based on loops, here both as written out "loop-counterpoints" derived originally from multiple turn-table performances, later from the addition of independently repeated models in the GAME-series; there are GAME-structures reoccuring in the piece, but only as episodes.

The other musical form structuring the piece is the song, focussed by Vargas voice; it opposes the complexities of the above mentioned counterpoints and also has the function of a direct transport of Blakes texts, which were moreover cut up by a machine called "Abulafia".

Bernhard Lang, Vienna, 25 December 2023