Wolffia

About

“Wolffia is the generic name for the smallest flowering plants that can be found. They tend to form floating mats together on the water’s surface and have no roots. Plants have fascinated me for a long time and have become an increasingly present source of inspiration in my compositional work. Their shape, behavior, color, and reactions to other elements are linked to my own perception of color, form, and sound.
It was by imagining the microscopic sounds produced by wolffias, inaudible to the human ear, that I began to conceive my piece for Ensemble Schallfeld. The moisture of each plant, the connections with their environment, the contact with the water’s surface, like little wobbly lentils trying to stay still, sparked my imagination.

I designed a composition that brings each of these components to life: the feeling of a stable situation, with the plants above and the water below, gradually zooming in on each micro-connection, friction, dialogue between plant and water, and the shapes formed by the movements of the “mat” of plants. Musically, such a natural environment gave me many ideas, especially using the amplification possibilities of the instruments. I worked particularly with very small and detailed sounds from bowed strings, saxophone whispers, and resonant percussion instruments. This piece can thus be perceived and understood as a living postcard of a fragment of our environment.”