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Track Record

• First Performance: Essen (June 15, 2006) by Quatuor Danel, for the project YOUrope Together
• Recording: Essen (June 15, 2006) Deutschlandradio Kultur by Quatuor Danel

Program Notes

Since long I've been intrigued by the following constatation: when you change the font of a text, sometimes the visual impact changes completely, while its content remains completely the same. In this work I tried to apply the same type of transformations to purely musical gestures, inspired on the physical action of the 'writer' (scrivente in Italian, hence the title), as suggested by the sculpting movements of the bows while playing.

Of course, this writing gesture is largely dependent on the nature of the support it is carving. The harmonic evolution of the piece, based on a large spectral morphing between 3 different material types, reflects this changing paper, causing the gestures, and hence the 'font', to transform. That's also why I've chosen to tune the 4 instruments in an unusual way. Not only makes it possible some new chords, but the changes in the resonances of the instruments allow the exploration of a completely different harmonic universe.

And that's also where the title comes from: Nevrištec is in fact an onomatopeia for the overall sound evolution of the piece. Which could be described as "4 musicians carving a text on a changing support"

Happy listening

Peter Swinnen

Brussels 09-06-2006

Nevrištec is a commission of Deutschlandfunk and Philharmonie Essen

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Research

Nevrištec per Quartetto d'Archi 2006

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Specifications

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Performance materials

Download the score