Orchestration: speaker + fl, ob, cl, bsn, hrn, tpt, tbn, vln, vla, vlc, db, pno, perc
Duration: 11 minutes

Alistair Zaldua Composer

Wilde Lieder Marx.Music Prizewinner in the Ensemble Category

Performances manifesto will be performed in Trier on Saturday 1 September, and in Birmingham on Tuesday 4 September.

Programme Note

The text for this work was constructed from two fragments from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto that are rewritten in ways that potentially reveal further meanings than those that can be found in the original text. This process uses Marx’s words and reformulates them, presenting versions of the text with gaps and thereby connecting parts of it that are not connected in the original. By re-presenting the text this way I aimed to uncover further meanings, however slight, that do not intend to contradict Marx, but to create a context as the text is read and reread several times and from different perspectives. My aim was to to allow the text to iterate over and again Marx’s prophesy that the situation of the proletariat becoming the ruling class creates the conditions for the end of class division itself. A corollary to this is found in the intention behind the change in the harmonic languages and timbral procedures employed, and in the changing relationships of the instrumental groups to the speaker and to each other. The ensemble as a whole aims at presenting the utopia of a classless society by including processes and staging situations that enact it.

Programme note copyright Alistair Zaldua 2018 and may not be reproduced without permission