The year that Mario Davidovsky was invited to be the Featured Composer at the University of Toronto’s New Music Festival, I was invited by Professor Dennis Patrick, the festival’s curator, to learn and perform Davidovsky’s Synchronisms No. 9 for Violin and Tape. As a violinist in my 20’s just out of school, studying this piece single-handedly took many of my technical and performance skills to the next level. Learning to play a duet with great precision with an unmovable and detailed electronic track challenged my inner pulse, my rhythmic accuracy, and greatly honed my intonation and dynamic precision.
In this piece, there is no room for personalized rhythmic freedom, rubato, or spontaneous dynamic inflections. Despite the many sections that need to closely mimic the timbre of the electronic part, it is still an inherently musical piece that echoes familiar violin gestures that originate from Romantic repertoire. (The composer himself directed me to execute large shifts as if I was playing a Paganini Concerto!). What makes this work so remarkable is that despite its virtuosic difficulty, Synchronisms No. 9 is still very idiomatically written for the instrument - it lies well under the hands and yet still challenges the performer to stretch their technical limits.
One of the most satisfying things about performing this piece is nailing the Bartok pizzicato note (snapping the string on the fingerboard) with the electronic part at the very end of the piece - no small feat when it is preceded by a silence and there is no click track!
I have come to know Synchronisms No. 9 so intimately and have performed it on numerous occasions and have committed the entire score to memory.
