Eclipses

Programme note
"Eclissi” (2007) for violin, viola, cello and bass and live electronics is a slow harmonic, textural and timbral metamorphosis of one single chord. Musicians perform in a soundproof plexiglass installation - a sort of a magic ‘soundproof music box’ which is illuminated by changing light from its inside that creates the effect of a shadow theater of the musicians’ motion. By means of electronics acoustic-visual fictions are created: audible sound (which is picked to be amplified by the computer) does not necessarily correspond to the bow gestures that are being followed by the audience and vice versa. Both parts played live and electronic filters are based on individual regularly pulsating rhythms, thus generating multilayered counterpoints of different pulsations and materializing an effect which is rather utopian for the acoustic instruments: pulsation of the different parameters (dynamic, timbre, harmony and texture) of one sound in non coincident tempos which don’t correlate with the rhythm of the bow motion. Speaking more metaphorically, these very silent, almost inaudible pulsations could remind us of a mysterious phenomenon of white dwarfs – stars in the last phase of their existence which are a research object of my father, astronomer Rimas Janulis. 

“Eclissi” was commissioned by the BCMG according to the “Integra” project, while the electronics was developed at the electronic studio of Malmö Academy of Music with Kent Olofsson.