A couple of years ago, the idea of doing 3 albums I am calling the Neo-Manierist series came to me while reading the book "Die Welt Als Labyrinth" by Gustav Rene Hocke. "Bella Maniera " is the first of this series.
So, what is the Neo-Manierism?
Manierism is an art style of 'unrest and strain', 'technique and artifice', 'ambiguity and insanity', 'fantasy and melancholy'. It hatched around 1520 AD after the death of Raphael as a reaction to the anthropocentric harmonious balance of Renaissance. Manierism flourished to 1590's. Then this revolutionary art style was neglected until the rediscoverly of its true esthetic value around 1920. The concept was 300 years ahead of its time!
When we look back at this period, what we observe are the figures of artists who were desperately in search of their artistic identities, painfully aware of the imposing existence of such unsurpassable masters as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. Painting techniques had been perfected by these masters. They were based on anatomy, geometric and atmospheric perspective methods, sfumato, and chromatics. There was nothing left for the artists that followed to develop in terms of techniques.
Simultaneously for artists in social unrest of that time, the orderly classical style esthetics of Renaissance was no longer effective to reflect the intertwining reality of their lives. They willfully discarded symmetry, coherence, and realism of Renaissance, in favor of unbalance, dissolution, artificiality and conciliation that more faithfully represented their mental state.
Manierists carefully studied works of Renaissance masters. The spirituality behind those masterpieces were of no interest of theirs, since it was too naive for them to take it seriously. They regarded those masterpieces as simply amalgamations of perfected techniques. They extracted these techniques out of context and taxonomically classified them. They called these classified techniques Maniera. Among those, particularly effective Maniera were referred to as "Bella Maniera". Then they recombined them in the most amazing manner and succeeded in creating something entirely new.
Composers today are placed in a strikingly similar position in music history as artists in the manierism era in art history. All the music readily available from our history and from cultural geography. Its ecriture already developed to the full sophistication, but its spirituality too naive and uncongenial to ramification of modern life. No new worthwhile ecriture beyond crude experimentation foreseeable in the immediate future. AND we desire to write music now!
Here I hope to express my version of the art of 'unrest and strain', 'technique and artifice', 'ambiguity and insanity', 'fantasy and melancholy' by attempting to do in music what manierists did in art. Hence I call this compositional style NEO-MANIERISM.
For this NEO-MANIERIST cycle, I randomly extracted compositional methodological elements (maniera) from classical, avant-garde, jazz, rock, ethnic, hip-hop, and techno music, then classified them into following categories: 'Thematic process', 'Rhythmic process', 'Contrapuntal process', 'Harmonic organization', 'Instrumentation', 'Orchestration' and 'Quotation'. Each category contained several hundred maniera. I selected maniera from different categories and juxtaposed them in the same musical space. Then I composed a fragment of music within the constraints of rules dictated by chosen set of maniera. The combinations of maniera were sometimes self-evident. Other times I randomly combined apparently unrelated maniera on purpose with amazing results after a bit of compositional effort!
I hope you enjoy listening to this recording as much as I enjoyed making it!
kim koschka