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Instrumentation: Flute, Clarinet, Piano, Violin, Violin, Viola, Cello
Year of composition: 2025
Duration: 11 minutes
Commission: Norbert Sterk
Funding: Stadt Wien Kultur
Premiere:
Antanina Kalechyts & Ensemble Reconsil @ Reaktor Wien
21.05.25
For years I was tormented by a growing awareness of the influences shaping my music. Every idea seemed to echo something familiar: a bit of Bartók from childhood, a formal habit from a professor in Budapest, a harmonic turn that belonged to Schoenberg, Barry Harris or Lisa Streich. Nothing felt entirely mine.
I tried to resist by cursing the great composers, chasing unfamiliar genres, insisting that everyone steals. But the awareness only grew heavier and my own voice seemed to dissolve.
Then one snowy Saturday, while playing Mozart for my beautiful wife, I caught myself intruding on the music by adding counterpoint, stretching cadences, shifting registers and being silly. Even in those small improvisations the ghosts returned: Shai Maestro, Feldman, the cantor from Vienna’s Great Synagogue. Even my improvisations were not fully mine.
In that moment, as I was dismantling Mozart, I learned something that changed my life:
Maybe not every note can be mine. But I can still be a crossroads for every note a singular and unrepeatable intersection of the worlds that shaped me.