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- Asbjørn Schaathun
"Our Whisper Woke no Clocks" (1993)
- Edition Wilhelm Hansen Copenhagen (World)
- 1.0.1.0/0.0.0.0/perc(sampler)/str(1.1.1.1.1)
- Piano
- 13 min
Programme Note
The title "Our Whisper woke no Clocks" is a line from the cycle of poems Twelve Songs (1936) by the American Poet W.H. Auden.
The work is on several levels permeated by the idea of clocks and bells; from the poetic level in the poem, through bell-like chords in the ensemble, to big sustained sounds of the percus-sion and sampler. We may call this the narrative level of the work.
Rather more important, however, are all the various layers of time, which give structure to the work; big chords appear from time to time as girders in the piece, whereas 17 equal parts occur in the concluding piano-epilogue with different velocity and woven-together. In this way constantly new harmonic con-stellations arise between the parts - that is ’the time as designer’, but also, to paraphrase an expression by the Finnish-Swedish poet Edith Södergran, ’time as the merciless destroyer’.
"Our Whisper Woke no Clocks" was composed for the Norwegian Cikada Ensemble and its pianist Kenneth Karlsson.
Asbjørn Schaathun
The work is on several levels permeated by the idea of clocks and bells; from the poetic level in the poem, through bell-like chords in the ensemble, to big sustained sounds of the percus-sion and sampler. We may call this the narrative level of the work.
Rather more important, however, are all the various layers of time, which give structure to the work; big chords appear from time to time as girders in the piece, whereas 17 equal parts occur in the concluding piano-epilogue with different velocity and woven-together. In this way constantly new harmonic con-stellations arise between the parts - that is ’the time as designer’, but also, to paraphrase an expression by the Finnish-Swedish poet Edith Södergran, ’time as the merciless destroyer’.
"Our Whisper Woke no Clocks" was composed for the Norwegian Cikada Ensemble and its pianist Kenneth Karlsson.
Asbjørn Schaathun
Scores
Score preview