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.

“In [Wolke über Bäumen], the clouds have come down, so that only occasional treetops, well separated, are visible—in other words, the music is riven with outbursts, the continuing stream of events in between being obscured. […] For much of the eighteen-minute duration, therefore, we’re listening to a near silence of straw sounds and taps […]. Yet this near silence is riveting. Many composers have tried to make solo violin pieces that could be played alongside Bach’s. This one would fit right in.”

— Paul Griffiths