Semafor (2020)
(for eight instruments)

Ideas for this piece started to turn in my mind when completing my orchestra piece Vista. There the orchestral texture is culminating at some point in a passage with quick xylophone ostinati on G in two alternating octaves, surrounded by short accented G-F# glissandi on solo wind instruments trying to cut violently that obsessive continuum. In that particular context the texture is short, and it couldn’t have been longer – even if I would have wanted it to continue – but the intensity of the obsessive octaves versus those scream-like glissandi stayed in my mind, asking to be developed for more music.

When I then started to work on this material, I realized my use of octaves here was different from the usual in my music; normally the octave is for me an interval for releasing the harmonic tension. It unwinds the musical intensity and direction, or at least fixes it, and we feel it physically. Here the tempo, register and dynamics, but above all the disturbing, accented glissando-screams remove the feeling of resolution, and I started asking myself what would happen if the whole piece would be about this contradictory, but reduced, material. Gradually the music grew into a study on breaking the combination of the ostinato & scream, building it again, varying, modifying, developing/metamorphosing it. The idea of the octave and more generally of regulating harmonic tension via separate intervals rather than by harmonic successions stayed central here. The music changes character from joyous to calm throughout the piece, also with the help of changing tempi that regulate the musical flow.

The Swedish spelling of the word semaphore is a reference to the late Finnish artist Ernst Mether-Borgström, whose first language was Swedish. His work has been well-known to me since my childhood, and I grew up with his paintings. He also created several versions of playful and colorful sculptures which he called Semafor, since he thought of them as traffic signs in our urban jungle. In his mind, he considered that art should surround us everywhere as a messenger of spiritual values in our life. Who wouldn’t agree?

Paris, February 21, 2022
KS