Aerra (2004) 14'

violin, piano

Commissioned by Paul Pankert and Claire Lecoq

The Belgians Paul Pankert and Claire Lecoq, members of Ensemble’88, asked me to wrote “a sort of bagatelle”, but I went a bit more far. I seem to be unable to compose bagatelles. The title has no meaning, though it reminds one of Ancient Greek aella (=whirling, vortical). I just replaced l by r, as I felt this closer phonetically to the piece's aura. The piece is built much like Beethovenian double sonata-form (as it appears in the final movement of the Eighth Symphony or in the first movement of the Fifteenth Quartet), but extending it to the level of, let's say, triple sonata-form. There are seven sections, four expositions/recapitulations with three developments between them. In the expositional sections I follow the Beethovenian manner as to linking principal and secondary subjects, but these subjects evolve from one section to another; they consist of the same primary thematic elements combined every time in a new way. The task was to create a really resisting material and to overcome its resistance resulting classical form, full of structural tension and tectonic stability.