(… violets …)
programme note:
In April 2020, I was fully engaged in an orchestral work for Flanders Symphony Orchestra, and although the lockdown initially gave a boost to the writing process, it soon became clear that the performance of that work would not happen. I put the writing on hold and started reading Marcel Proust’s Recherche. When the orchestra suggested I create something that would fit within a Mozart programme, I constructed this miniature to subsequently expand into an orchestral work – an alternative that eventually didn’t happen either, but did find a different development in the duo (…fend…).
I associated Proust’s slowness and halted time due to the pandemic with a quote from Don Giovanni (Ah! Tempo più non v’è!). This quotation was transformed into a twelve-tone chord and series, and Mozart’s tonality was reduced to overtone chords. I sought a transition between these two tonal worlds and organised the whole into an extremely slow, quasi timeless, structure. Although every note in this minute of music is reasoned, the result is something I personally perceive as being simply beautiful, as a personal unity of the abstract and expressive.