Pÿramide, a Paul Klee

Commissioned by Ensemble Klang,
with financial support from the Nederlands Fonds Podiumkunsten
Première: Ensemble Klang 31st May 2012 – Smart Project Space, Amsterdam

Program notes
In December 2011 I visited an exhibition dedicated to the Swiss painter Paul Klee by La Citè de la Musique of Paris and was deeply impressed. This exposition, titled “Polyphonies,” focused on Klee’s work and its relation to music. Klee was also a musician and music was at the forefront of his thought and artistic investigations. In the 1930’s he endeavored to integrate musical notions into his painting, including one concept that particularly interests me: polyphony through transparency.
In his 1930 painting Pÿramide, shapes also function as colored filters, windows onto both something else and the objects themselves to be observed. Our eyes face simultaneously different and complementary perspectives and depths.

My piece for Ensemble Klang is an homage to Paul Klee and a study on light, opacity, and sonic transparency. Ensemble Klang has a very wide and special sound palette that goes from the extreme transparency of a lens to the dense impenetrability of a wall. I wanted to create different aural perspectives with layers and shadowing techniques and to explore the properties of sound in terms of veiling and revealing.
In "Pÿramide", a Paul Klee there are landscapes characterized by mobile foregrounds and backgrounds, by sound textures with different levels of opacity that work as filters that either allow through or obscure what is hidden behind them. In visual terms, my research focuses on how can the light become the focal point.