Redemption: Book 1, for string quartet and chamber orchestra, is the first part of Hatzis' larger Redemption cycle of five works, which centres on the story of humanity's spiritual fall and redemption as expounded by American seer Edgar Cayce. Each of the five parts within the cycle are stand-alone works, but contain thematic links that bring them together. As such, the complete cycle can be presented together as part of a larger festival event.
<
Redemption is a cycle of works based on a theme meditated upon by turn-of the-century American seer Edgar Cayce, namely the story of humanity's spiritual fall and redemption seen through the various lives of this story's protagonist, the Master soul. In its latest incarnation on Earth the Master soul was known as Yeshua of Nazareth. In variance with Christian orthodox doctrine, Cayce sees Christ not as a separate entity from humanity but, as a pattern to be won by every soul desiring to be reunited with its source during its various journeys through materiality. Conceived and implemented at the beginning of time in order to free humanity from its bondage in materiality, the soul/pattern "Christ" is identified with Biblical personages such as Adam, Enoch, Melchizedek, Joseph, Joshua (Moses' right hand), Asaph (King David's psalmist), but also with other personages outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, such as Amillus (the first human manifestation on earth as an energy/spirit projection), Hermes (the builder of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh according to Cayce), and Zend (the father of Zarathustra and founder of the Zoroastrian religion). There are also approximately 20 other incarnations that are associated with the soul/pattern "Christ", that Cayce did not specifically mention. The careful study of these individuals and the esoteric traditions that have sprung forth around them gives rise to a fascinating cosmological, ethical and soteriological discourse that may help us see these age-old religious traditions in a completely new light and ascribe new relevance to them for our troubled times.
The first movement of Redemption: Book 1documents humanity's wilful fall from its spiritual habitat and its enmeshment in materiality. Bound by the laws of materiality, humanity gets corrupted and loses the memory of its origin with no possibility of escape. Amilius, the first, spiritual Adam of some Gnostic traditions, pleads the creative forces to be allowed to descend to Earth and help prepare a way for the trapped souls to return to humanity's original exalted state. He is not successful and realises that humanity cannot be "preached" out of its fall, but a way must be created, through which the trapped souls may learn through repeated incarnations that the strategy of self-sacrifice is the only way to reach Heaven for humankind. The origin of this idea, at the spiritual level, is the emergence of redemption.
The music of the first movement is cosmic in nature and draws upon these elements to construct its musical material. The central symbol of this movement and subsequent movements in this and other books is encapsulated in the opening measures of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. In Redemption, Book 1, the sudden modulation of the Strauss quotation from C major to C minor and back to a triumphant C major again is used as a symbol of the Fall and Redemption. The first movement is predominately in C major, while the second movement culminates in the modulation from C major to C minor, representing Adam and Eve's fall from innocence. The work returns to C major at the very end of the third movement, where the Strauss quotation acts as the harmonic pillars that support the structure of the entire work.
To construct a more harmonically rich texture for the Strauss C major chord, I settled on the complexity drawn from the overtone series, where the soloists and orchestra are asked to occasionally adjust their intonation microtonally, into third-tones to better accommodate the seventh, eleventh and higher partials of the overtone series. This "cosmic" chord is rarely presented in its purist form and can be found initially accompanied at the opening of the work with a deafening attack on the tam-tam, before being blended with the use of extended techniques such as multiphonics, along with high- pressure bowing from the strings, which represent both the heavenly pattern and its earthly corruption. Two other "cosmic" chords that Hatzis employs, taken from the harmonic series, are chords constructed from overtones that correspond to the Fibonacci numerical series, as well as the "golden ratio" chord that consists of superimposed microtonal intervals lying halfway between a major and a minor 6th.
Offsetting these three cosmic chords - the overtone chord, the Fibonacci chord and the golden ratio chord - is a 12-tone row consisting of a hexachord drawn from the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh partials of the overtone series, their 12-tone equal temperament equivalents, and its retrograde inversion. This row represents the earthly corrupting forces in the unfolding of the redemption story. This interplay between the Platonic "forms" and corrupting "necessity" eventually gives rise to consciousness, our empirical way of understanding and interpreting the world around us. This is introduced in the work as a gigue for the string quartet, which is immediately "corrupted" by the 12-tone row.
The second movement, Fall from Innocence, documents the actual primordial fall as represented in the biblical parable of Genesis. Here the string quartet represents the human element of "Adam and Eve" - one soul entity split into two genders, while the orchestra predominantly represents the physical attraction of materiality. In this movement, the naive innocence of both Adam and Eve is represented by a passacaglia in C major before gradually developing into a passacaglia that is sometimes reminiscent of Pachelbel's Canon and at other times resembles film music.
Counteracting the cyclical harmonic world of the passacaglia is the orchestral progression of the 12-tone row arranged as a symmetrical succession of major and minor trichords, a combination that integrates both serialism and tonality. The resultant soundworld produced is one of tonal ambiguity, where the 12-tone row is arranged in a particular way that appears to endorse the hierarchical principles of the common practice harmonic system on the surface, while simultaneously sabotaging it at a deeper level.
Eventually the string quartet yields to the dissonance of the orchestra through passages of bitonality, atonality, kitsch and noise, before succumbing to the 12-tone row. The quartet's symbolically "naked" statement of the row represents both Adam and Eve's awareness of their own "nakedness". As a result the theme from the orchestra blasts out Strauss' Zarathustra, which modulates from C major to C minor, symbolising the fall in Christian theology.
The subject of the third movement is out of sequence with the chronological order of the lives of the Master as given by Cayce. In the end I decided on Melchizedek over Enoch as the former is more associated to the redemptive plan of humankind as proposed in Book 1. In several early Christian writings, Melchizedek is actually identified with Jesus as one and the same entity and there is some evidence to suggest that early Jewish and Christian traditions of the first century identified Melchizedek and the Messiah as one and the same person. As a result, the music of this movement is monothematic and borrows the opening theme from my choral symphony Redemption 5: Sepulcher of Life, the final book of the Redemption cycle. Initially heard at the conclusion of the second movement, the four-note motive of C, A-flat, G, E-flat, and its six-note extension undergo several transformations throughout the final movement. This movement is fractal, in that it replicates itself at a local motivic level on the one hand, and on a broader perspective - based on the respective notes of the fractal motive - is developed to produce the overall structure of the four sections of the movement.
The movement concludes with the reverse modulation from C minor to C major, symbolising Redemption. It is not conclusive, however, indicating that the larger structure will continue unfolding into the next work in the cycle and beyond.
Full of interesting sounds and obviously fun to play and listen to, Redemption: Book 1… is less of a concert piece than it is a vast religious meditation, undergirded by multiple levels of meaning, not all of them primarily musical.
