Last summer, “Off the Beaten Path Festival” director Lora Tchekoratova invited Peter Kervelov to the Bulgarian village of Kovachevitsa, where the festival takes place, as part of a residency program for composers. Within a week, Peter had the opportunity to meet the exceptional people who organize and participate in the festival, exchanging ideas about what the new piece could be like for the next edition of the festival in 2024. Thus was born an idea for a work for 2 violins, 2 cellos, clarinet, piano, and electronics. The time spent with the musicians, as well as getting to know the village of Kovachevitsa, had a direct impact on the music in this work.
Peter now lives in the present, but his earthly footsteps fall into the footsteps of millions of departed souls who once lived there. A step is a way of moving, but also an intersection between the human body and the planet.
Peter isn’t sure if the maddening summer heat in the Bulgarian village of Kovachevitsa carried him into a state of delirium or inspiration, but he felt with his feet the melodies of the many who had inhabited this space before. They came to him like shards of a broken mirror – containing and concealing parts of the past. The hidden – shrouded in mystery, obscure, unknown, forever lost – dissolved to manifest itself in unlived memory, vibrations of unfinished songs. He shares these eavesdropped songs of light drawn from the dark blue of oblivion.
Stepping on the pulsating earth, turned into a tuning fork of non-existent voices, Peter remembered a phrase from a poem by Emily Dickinson: “… then space began to toll …” And indeed, the space around him rang. And now it’s the audience’s turn to vibrate with it.
Peter dedicates this work to his companion in life, Anatoli.
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention