breathing

2014

breathing
for cello solo 
Instrumentation: cello
Premiere: 14 August 2014, Darmstadt; Alice Purton
Duration: approx. 6 minutes
Score: Buy score at BabelScores!
Program note:
breathing for prepared cello is the last section (section 10), but the first to be composed, from a much larger work for cello, electronic music and visual performance.
Performed as a solo piece, breathing does not utilize any electronics or video.
The music isn’t intended to illustrate any kind of breathing but to be in itself the “breathing”, in the large scale work as a re-wakening and as a solo piece, the enjoyment of life (breathing gives life!). Structurally the work as a whole and down to its very details is influenced by prime numbers. The reasons for this are manifold. They grow like weeds among the natural numbers, seeming to obey no other law than that of chance, and nobody can predict where the next one will sprout. The second fact is even more astonishing, for it states just the opposite: that the prime numbers exhibit stunning regularity, that there are laws governing their behavior, and that they obey these laws with almost military precision. The stability of the structure, its symmetry and beauty, is the way in which the understanding takes its perceptible form and communicates itself to the listener… to understand something about the material and how, conceptually, music communicates itself to the listener.

“the dichotomy between the very predictable world of mathematics and the almost whimsical nature of prime numbers”

score excerpt page 1

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