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Programme Note

Composer note:

The work revolves around a specific musical and compositional idea and is based on the following prerequisites:

The solo instruments and the orchestra are both divided up into two groups. In each case one of these employs a tuning which is a quarter tone lower than that of the other. In the orchestra Strings I is set against Strings II, whereas the soloists zheng is tuned a quarter tone lower than the koto and the bass koto. The unusual tuning makes it possible to treat the twelve-note areas which occur in both groups as contrasting musical spheres, or as ‘a region of light’ and ‘a region of shadow’.

The discourse involving the two regions (‘light’ and ‘shadow’) constitutes an attempt to come to grips with both the musical rendering and the emotional significance of the phenomenon we refer to as shadow. Thus the process which leads to a greater understanding of the phenomenon is cast in the form of a musical discourse which in the end reveals to us that shadow is the sphere of existence from which life emanates, and even light.


--Sofia Gubaidulina