Writing music for the common 20th-century types of classical ensembles that comprise a variety of instruments, has lost its appeal to me over the last couple of years. My musical forms tend to show a reduction to homogeneous instrumental compositions: the Marian Antiphons for 12 voices a cappella, the Insane Dances for saxophone quartet, Six Bagatelles for Two Violins, the Suite – Homage to Alfred Schnittke for three cellos, and many more. And thus, I conceived of a cycle over a lifetime, titled Similar, and its first chapter is to be the Lacrimosa or 13 Magic Songs for seven violins.
Lacrimosa or 13 Magic Songs is a lamentation, man’s final prayer before Judgement. This prayer can at once be incisive and show the various states of mankind: gleeful, repenting, fearful, lamenting, faithful… During the performance of the 13 Songs, the listeners’ souls are supposed to pass through a series of excruciating, excessive stages, to finally reach a catharsis. This direction determines the cycle’s dramaturgic structure.
My aim is to transform an immediate, openly emotional response to powerful impressions — something most contemporary art refuses to deal with — into the musical form of the Lacrimosa. For all the varied techniques to be applied in the work, its emphasis is on the emotion, its aspiration to capture the listeners’ minds, immersing them in the atmosphere of each part. This idea can be realised only by a multi-voice single-timbre ensemble of violins, at once a unity and a multitude, one soul and its many voices, a number of people struggling to come at peace with the world, one another, and silence…
