Wolke über Bäumen [2016]

for violin (with gut strings and Baroque bow)

duration :: 13’

Commissioned by the Ultima Festival for Karin Hellqvist

First performance :: Karin Hellqvist — Ultima Festival (Oslo, Norway), 13 September 2016

Recordings :: Dejana Sekulić — HCR; Sarah Saviet — Coviello Classics

“Wolke über Bäumen”, cloud above trees, is the name of a crayon drawing by Paul Klee: a sinuous, snakingly horizontal nest of a line above a jagged, chaotic, but equally horizontal forest of sharp angles. What this private sketch has to do with a detuned violin, strung with gut, with an interlocking series of canons in motu contrario, or with the concluding Passagalia from Biber’s Rosenkranz-Sonaten isn’t entirely clear: but it’s something about simultaneous substrates, a series of tenuously balanced obstacles obstructing each others’ lines of sight.