En un ciel inconnu notre ciel est changé

About

“The pervasive effluvium invades and denatures
Everything; our air becomes like the air that saturates it;
In an unknown sky our sky is changed.
Everywhere, in an instant, the virus spreads
Falls upon the waters, descends on the goods of the earth;
Everything that nourishes man and livestock is altered.
If it escapes into the air, the air itself returns it to us:
The mixture bathes us, and, just by breathing,
We are forced to absorb the purulent waves.”

On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura)
Lucretius



“In this piece, I question our relationship to time during the periods of lockdown in the global pandemic of 2020. Indeed, trapped in this situation of confinement, time seems frozen, slow, and at the same time the days pass faster than ever. The temporal unfolding is thus shifting, flexible, perceived in multiple ways at different moments of the day. This experience generated in me the desire to work on relative tempi, with the intention of blurring the listener’s temporal landmarks. In this piece, I used a wide palette of timbres for each instrument. The bass clarinet plays a central role, while the violin and viola alternate between moments where they form a hybridization with the clarinet, and more soloistic moments. The character is lively, violent, with some floating, out-of-time moments, noisy reprises of the opening bars, and a final suspended solo in the breath of the bass clarinet. The form is established according to principles of repetition of the same extended, stretched, masked materials, returned to their initial state, and according to systems of changes of scale.”

Clara Olivares, September 2020