For Contrabass Clarinet, Bassoon, Violoncello and Percussion
2022
(20€) Die Stillste Stunde is a 11 minutes chamber music piece wrote for the Ensemble Aventure (Freiburg) in 2022. It’s based on a poem taken from Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche and it depicts the exact moment of realization of Zarathustra to become the Übermensch. This moment happens in one of his dreams as inner dialogue between him and his inner voice, here however pictured as a powerful outer entity.
Yesterday towards evening there spake unto me my stillest hour: that is the name of my terrible mistress.
And thus did it happen—for everything must I tell you, that your heart may not harden against the suddenly departing one!
Do ye know the terror of him who falleth asleep?—
To the very toes he is terrified, because the ground giveth way under him, and the dream beginneth.
44. The Stillest Hour from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
The moment in which the subject gives itself time to rest, to become quiet, becomes innerly a tumultuous drive to change, a violent dialogue that can’t be seen from outside as well as by the consciousness. This brings to a graft and thus a germination to a big change. It’s a chain of events which becomes inevitable.
This apparent paradox, that is changing while being quiet, is depicted in this piece whose first part uses silent and tonless sounds in each instrument, though with impetuous and restless rhythms. That brings us to the second part, where the graft makes appearance and there’s a big conflict with what the subject was before, and with what it is going to be. The example here in the right is exactly this moment, after which there’s the third and last calm and resolute part where the graft became part of the Ego and defines the new person which the subject became.
This composition is the result also of a close interaction between the musicians of the Ensemble Aventure and the composer, in order to find original or interesting sounds on each instrument. Particular attention was dedicated to the contrabass clarinet and the percussion. The first one was a great discovery for me, whose deep sound and amazing tone colors possibilities enriched my personal musical vocabulary. The second one brought to a new system of notation for the bass drum played with the hands, whose tone colors are rarely exploited in music composition. This piece was a great challenge for me to consider music also as tactile, something that can also be physically felt.
