Leef - Elegy Canaanite Fantasy No 3 For Harpsichord (Softcover Book)

Similiar to its two sister-works, ELEGY looks back to the past and to ancient musical colors and ideals, combining musical ornamentations of nature within contemporary Western modes of expression. The composer accounts that "the most interesting and attractive challenge for me was to try to relate to the special characteristics of the harpsichord - its rather confined range of dynamics on the one hand, and the great richness of the single tone on the other - and to attempt to formulate a contemporary view towards the historical and stylistic connotations of this instrument. The work combines some typical music structures, such as repetitions and sequential patterns, within a general improvisatory feeling, and leads, as the climax resolves, to a short quation from J.S. Bach's 'The Art of Fugue', which gradually disintegrates into the central motif of the work. The title ELEGY invokes a looking backwards, with a sense of longing and maybe even sadness, to a world of sounds that has perhaps lost its glitter, to a past era, but not without a certain hope for its renewal."