Style and Technique of Composition
“Hanna Kulenty’s music is permeated with images of organic transformation and growth. The intuitive shaping of evolving sound patterns, extended phrases and richly detailed textures in these works results from Kulenty’s original compositional technique which she calls ‘the polyphony of arches’ or ‘arcs’. The works include many layers of simultaneous ‘arches’ which may begin at different points of their trajectories and proceed at different speeds.
Her compositional style has evolved during the years since her dazzling orchestral debut, Ad Unum, a powerful, dissonant, dramatic and well-crafted study of convergence towards musical unity. Since that work, Kulenty’s preferred medium has been the symphony orchestra.
Through the 1990s the composer developed an original version of ‘post-minimalist’ style, characterized by a reduction of the number and density of musical layers, in comparison with the earlier, saturated and dramatic style of the ‘polyphony of arches’. She called this style her version of the ‘European trance music’. Kulenty seldom used sudden textural cuts and shifts in this period. Instead, she often structured her compositions as single, powerful arches, slowly evolving in time, gradually increasing their gripping intensity of emotion.
Her penchant for musical drama and intensity of emotion found a suitable expression in her music for stage. The ‘intuitive constructivism’ coupled with a heightened emotional intensity of her music is well-suited for highlighting dramatic situations. Kulenty’s mastery of time and her ability to structure her musical material into layers moving inexorably, inevitably towards powerful climaxes brings a symphonic dimension to her other theatrical compositions.
Kulenty’s latest compositional technique of the ‘polyphony of time dimensions’ emphasizes the circularity of time and the simultaneity of time-events occurring on different temporal planes.”
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