Paul Valéry
This work was composed for viola, double bass and video-mapping in 2016. It has been commissioned by Initiative Neue Music Berlin e.V.. It was premiered by Johnny Chang on the viola and Koen Nutters on the double bass at the Spektrum hall in Berlin in September 2016. It has been part of the Perceptive Turns 4th Edition series, curated by Lucio Capece.
PRESS MATERIAL
The idea of this work is to set different processes into motion which change silently, without attracting too much attention. I want to connect this thought with that sort of things that are produced and presented to our senses, but we do not usually perceive. Banal expressions, which are offered to us at any place and time, and for this very reason, are almost never noticed. Those aspects in which every factor is transformed but not detached enough to be discerned clearly. They are what the French Philosopher François Julliendefines as too still to be distinguished, although their outcome is confirmed by us eventually.
Each one of these factors, which is slowly modified, usually leads gradually to its inversion, the idea being that it reaches its opposite, almost unnoticed. This transformation is what I understand to be at the heart of the transition, of the indefinite, within that sort of transitional time that allows us to go from one shape to the other, the in between, the trans of the trans-formation. Transition is that which knows no limits or boundaries of possible separation that allow us to distinguish one thing from the other; whatever inhibits us from saying where and when a quality or property begins and ends.
In this work, both the notion of modification, which diverges and innovates, and the idea of continuation or permanence, which continues and inherits, concerns me as well. On the one hand, these two concepts are opposite, but on the other hand and at the same time, each one of them defines the condition of the other. Thanks to the modification, the process that has been started does not die because it is renewed in order to remain, and reciprocally, it is the continuation that conveys everything that is happening and transforms modification into a transitive time too.
All transformations generated in this work are thought as global, progressive and keep within the time. The determining factor for the work to be perceived is to conceive time as expanded, as an endless present, where past, present and future are not consecutive but simultaneous parts of the same moment, of the same continuous and constant reality.
Sergio Bové
