Monday 22 October 2012

Motivic

Describing his compositional technique, John Adams said: 'rather than set up small engines of motivic materials and let them run free in a kind of random play of counterpoint, I used the fabric of continually repeating cells to forge large architectonic shapes, creating a web of activity that, even within the course of a single movement, was more detailed, more varied, and knew both light and dark, serenity and turbulence.'

Yeah. Me too.

2 comments:

Archie_V said...

Didn't Motivic go out on loan to Wigan Athletic or did he stay at Fulham in the end? Good skills, but his pace was never the same after that cruciate-ligament injury.

"Architectonic" is even worse; it's an exact synonym of "architectural", trying too hard to Blu-Tac some added import onto the word by borrowing the suffix that's used in some Romance languages (arquitectónico and architettonico are the Spanish and Italian for, er, "architectural").

Adam Roberts said...

Your comment is a real tonic. Indeed, it's really arquitectónic. O.