Commissioned for the string players of the Ensemble Klangforum (Austria) by the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics of the University of Music at Graz. The commission was awarded within the frame of the international research project “Patterns of Intuition”
Instrumentation: 2vn, va, vc, db
duration: 7:45
World Premiere: 2 July 2014 | Ligetisaal at Mumuth Concert Hall, Graz, Austria | String players of the Ensemble Klangforum. Annette Bik – violin, Sophie Schafleitner – violin, Dimitrios Polisoidis – viola, Andreas Lindenbaum – cello
Program Notes: The corruptive dimension of the reconstructive nature of memory serves as a formal model for the unraveling of the present work. Recent neuroscience research coraborates early twentieth century views on memory as a dynamic and evolving phenomenon: remembering is not a simple retrieval of past events. Memory stores only fragments of the past that later serve for the mental reconstruction of past events, which are susceptible to various kinds of biases and distortions, as well as selective and elaborative processes.
In Quasi (ébauche) the original formative ideas are constantly recalled in a series of reconstructions of the past in constantly present contexts, having at times more fidelity—and at times growing less similar—to the original experience. These reconstructions, by means of pitch gene recombinations, leave only memory vestiges of the original by constantly shifting, diffusing, distorting, transforming, omitting or adding events according to a model of retention/corruption.
It is, in other words, like drawing “on the elements and gist of the past, and extract, recombine and reassemble them into imaginary events that never occurred in that exact form,…not to preserve the past but to adapt it so as to enrich and manipulate the present.’’ It is all about what is remembered and how it is remembered…
Performance History:
- July 2, 2014, String players of the Ensemble Klangforum (Annette Bik – violin, Sophie Schafleitner – violin, Dimitrios Polisoidis – viola, Andreas Lindenbaum – cello) | Ligetisaal at Mumuth Concert Hall, Graz, Austria |
dimitri papageorgiou 