commande: Concerts Sweden
création: 13.9.1990, Stockholm New Music Festival
Talekvartetten
éditeur: Svensk Musik
Stråkvåg (String Wave) has to do with water, and the weight of a mass.“Imagine getting into a small boat, feel how it is rocked by the weight of your body and follows the waves on the water… feel the line of the surface between water and air. This surface line, studded with small moving ornaments in shifting scales of color, is audible, and in the score, visible; it sounds simply a D and can be called the central tone.“ Stråkvåg is carried by and flows through a framework register composed of just such fixed tones/lines. In its intensity, character, and use of sound, the movement can be seen as an overture to later pieces from the 1990s:
the way a tone is conjured, breathes, and dies out, the way a sound becomes a tone, then a noise, then is broken off. A sort of “microdrama“ where the small sonorous nuances, the short, explosive gestures that break out, and the resulting rhythmic ostinatos together with the resting quality of the soft melodic fragments form a wave-like foundation.
Madeleine Isaksson (Translation: George Kentros)