Terrains Vagues

For the Portugal-born composer Luís Antunes Pena, exploring the use of computers and various forms of instrumental and electronic resynthesis is at the centre of his work as a composer. Although the "consciousness of uncertainty" is a key concept in his aesthetic. Here uncertainty is a factor which shakes the "certainties" of the process of composition and interpretation that are manifested in the supposedly clear notation of the score.

In the composition »Im Rauschen Rot« a »quasi regular pulse« is continually displaced and disturbed by intoxicated sounds. The dynamic of the music thus derives from the constant infiltration of a supposed regularity.

Noise-like sounds is also generated in the compostion »Música para 30 Metais«, which requires a varied set of 30 cymbals with overlapping resonance spectra.

For »Eyjafjallajokull« Pena works primarily with the untypical sounds of the organ of Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne and focuses on the mechanical and percussive potentials of this instrument.

For the electronic composition »Vermalung I – Western Music« Pena uses as a basis the first few minutes of the soundtrack of Sergio Leone's film »Once upon a Time in the West«, analysed them, filtered out the rhythmic information and creates a new work on this basis.

The cello solo »Winterlich ruhende Erde«, with its title referring to a quotation from Thomas Mann's novel »Doktor Faustus«, unchains, through modulations of silence, a cosmic dance that flows back into silence.