ROLF WALLIN (*1957):
Seven Disobediences
Seven Imperatives is my answer to the tradition of character pieces for piano, such as Debussy’s Préludes and Grieg’s Lyric Pieces; short, relatively simple but concise miniatures with a motto, and usually with one prevalent sentiment—like a musical short story. The title of each of the seven pieces is an imperative consisting of four letters: Seek! Push! Lean! Etc.

One of the pianists who has taken the Imperatives into his repertoire, is Kenneth Karlsson—central to the founding and artistic development of Cikada. So, when Donaueschinger Musiktage asked me to write a work for Cikada for their concert there in 2018, I seized the opportunity to explore another cornerstone of the piano literature: In a solo concerto, you see a whole orchestra dutifully following a brilliant ego that is completely dominating the stage. Beethoven’s last piano concerto was even called the Emperor Concerto, an epithet the thoroughly anti-authoritarian composer would have hated.

As I transformed Seven Imperatives (2001) into the “concert” Seven Disobediences (2018), I looked into Cikada’s beautiful collaborative social and artistic structure. When Kenneth, “The Emperor” (Italian: imperatore) gives his imperatives to his fellow musician, how do they react? Well, when he tells them to spin, they happily spin together with him, but when he says “SINK!”, they do the opposite and rise gracefully towards the sky. Towards the end, they all leave their positions and their instruments and gather around the piano’s big body to caress it and make it purr by fondly knocking on its shiny, black surface in loving disobedience.
—Rolf Wallin


KLAUS LANG (*1971):
parthenon.
Parthenon, or the construction of beauty.
In my work as a composer, the two main influences were the Greek and the Japanese tradition of art and thought. Both traditions found ways of representing their worldviews in great pieces of architecture. Architecture mirrors a worldview. parthenon. is reflecting basic assumptions of Greek aesthetics.

Plato was very much influenced by the philosophy of Pythagoras. For Pythagoreans, mathematics describes the structure of the cosmos and define the laws of beauty. As we have seen, beauty draws lines, it discriminates: it is discrete numbers that make limits and beauty definable. Numbers make order perceivable; they represent order and make order easily reproduceable, thus, they cannot only be used to clearly define the laws of beauty, but the idea of beauty is always linked to the concept of numbers. One example for these ideas is the Parthenon temple in Athens which was constructed as a symmetrical structure (symmetrical 4:4 (front) 8:8 (sides)) but also uses golden mean proportions for the design of all internal structures.

A very interesting element of Greek temples is their friezes. A Greek temple is a strict abstract geometrical form that encloses in the frieze an element made of naturalistic representations of persons animals etc. The contingent world of objects is thereby enclosed in a world of geometrical necessity. This confers perfectly with the definition of beauty given in Plato's dialogues. It is also a principle that I used in my composition parthenon. and that is important for my work in general. For me, the basic idea of how to translate from one field of art into another, is not to imitate the surface (like Programmmusik) but to find underlying abstract principles and give them an acoustical representation. In the case of parthenon., the boundlessness of nature as depicted in the frieze is represented by numbers taken from the endless Fibonacci-series whereas the principle of order and lawfulness is present through the usage of static and confined Pythagorean number proportions. The structure of the temple is mirrored by a narrow band of sound, full of life and constantly changing (the frieze), that is enclosed by simple, linear structures in the very low and the very high registers mirroring the shape of the building.

In a sense my piece is something like a photographic negative of the Greek structure: In the Greek frieze, marble is used to represent everchanging life; my piece uses the most ephemeral material – sound – to represent architecture.
—Klaus Lang


RICHARD BARRETT (*1959):
The Empire of Lights / khasma / stirrings
One of the highlights of my compositional activity at the beginning of the 21st century was my collaboration with Cikada and Christian Eggen, which culminated in several runs of performances, and a CD recording, of the extended composition DARK MATTER, a collaboration also with installation artist Per Inge Bjørlo and the Elision Ensemble from Australia. The three pieces recorded here were written for Cikada and performed several times as a “triptych”. The performance at Huddersfield was particularly memorable.

Of course, it’s not unusual for schedules to be unrealistically tight in festival conditions… On the day of the concert, we first had to wait until the venue had been cleared after the lunchtime event, which involved an entire stage full of percussion instruments, and the sense of urgency and chaos escalated, until we were finally doing our soundcheck while an audience was waiting in another space for me to give a preconcert talk. In the midst of this, someone’s phone behind me suddenly gave out a ringtone of Terry Riley’s In C—I turned with a murderous look on my face to find that the someone was my composition teacher Peter Wiegold … but, as often happens in situations like this, the actual performance was a liberation from all that tension into some incandescent playing from all concerned.
—Richard Barrett