Traversing melancholy

Abstract

The Symbolic and the Imaginary pertain to different aspects of language, the former to the signifier, the ‘meaningless material element in a closed differential system’ and the latter to the signified, the deceptively stable product of the process of signification. The song opens with a stratified texture, characteristic of Nikos Skalkottas’s style particularly in his 1940s works. The conspicuous bass and vocal lines frame a thick chordal inner part, whose initiatory semitonal movements seem to obey some bodily, tactile economy, soon to give way under the strain of the pianist’s increasingly more strenuous hand stretches. The impression of the uncanny is readily sensed in bar 34 due to the sudden thinning-out of the texture, drop of dynamics and return of the opening sombre tempo. Both the vocal melody and the piano’s countermelody are clearly audible; as is the way they are contrapuntally combined in an oscillating octatonic and diatonic embrace.

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