Martijn Padding about ‘It comes from afar’:
Harmonie St Michaël’s request was to create a work with a certain monumentality in which all orchestral groups are properly represented. After visiting one of their concerts I realized the size of the enormous orchestra, a colossal machine suddenly reveals itself to you. And within that also (quantities of) instruments for which I, as a symphonic composer, have not written before. For example, several tubas, twenty-two clarinets, six euphoniums, in short, a challenge!
The structure of the work is one-part with strong contrasts and alternations between tutti passages and very thinned out moments. A slow, ascending movement can be heard throughout the work, both in the harmony and in the more melodic passages. As the work progresses, lightning-fast bolts shoot through the music more often and for longer, coming closer and closer, as it were. Initially only in piano and percussion, but later also together with the woodwinds.
The image of that colossal orchestra reminded me of a story my grandfather, born at the end of the nineteenth century, told me as a child about the passing of Halley’s Comet to Earth in 1911. The fear this caused was enormous at the time. Suddenly a large block of stone appeared, threatening the earth. People lost their fortunes in just a few days because they feared the end times. That comet came from very far away and was a piece of space, millions of years old, consisting of rock, ice and gas explosions. The story made a mysterious impression on me, especially the fact that it came from so far in space but also in time. As a seven-year-old, I found this quite worrying.
Although ‘It comes afar’ does not try to express Halley’s comet and it is an abstract piece of music with an unambiguous development and logical instrumental scenario, I realize that something of the menacing and mysterious part of that story from my childhood has lingered because the slow ascent of the chromatic harmony into canon gives the piece a dark color that has not previously occurred in my pieces.
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