back to list of works
Rolf Wallin:
Appearances(2002)
for large ensemble
This planet has seen many lifeforms emerge and vanish on its surface. Each of them has had a lifespan, long or short. A species can be marginal or totally dominant, and its extinction can be almost imperceptibly gradual or dramatically abrupt. Similarly, in human history, great and not so great ideas, good and evil, have appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in a bewildering, fascinating stream. One example is the highly refined and seemingly durable thoughts of art and philosophy, currently almost suffocating in the deluge of sewer water from the entertainment industry. The Earth is full of these patterns, like a midsummer's sky: the clouds emerge literally from thin air, grow, reshape and vanish, the fate of each of them impossible to predict for the spectator.
This music behaves in very much the same manner. Yes, I say "it behaves", because during the composition process, I have let the different musical entities in the piece evolve almost on their own, instead of by a preconceived principle. They also have suggested to me how much and where in the timespan of the work they should appear and disappear, and their relationship with the other musical "inhabitants" of the piece. Some novelists describe how their characters start to live their own life during the writing of a book, and that's exactly how I have felt during the creation of this piece. It has grown in the tension between the manyfaceted interaction of the wills and needs of the different musical entities, and my own urge as a composer to read a meaningful pattern in it.
Appearances was commissioned by Ensemble Intercontemporain.