An Echo from Hitting the Trunk of a Dry Mountain Spruce in Rycerka Gorna Village
Performed by Gleb Kanasevich (Clarinet), Sabina Torosjan (Violin), Margarita Rovenskaya (Piano), Sean Statser (Percussion)
“Wandering in the thicket of the Polish Beskids, I came across the trunk of a huge dry spruce… Starting to tap on the wood, I was astounded by the quality and volume of sound which this dry dead tree was capable of! It grew, lived, and filled the atmosphere with oxygen for two hundred years, then died, dried up — and all of this in order to give birth to this amazing sound! This episode was a powerful impetus for me. When the Polish ensemble Kwartludium commissioned a work based on impressions or inspirations from Poland, for me this was embodied in the sound of dry spruce.” Rycerka Górna is a picturesque village in the Polish Beskids (a part of the Carpathian Mountains). In the opening measures of the piece, the prepared piano part recreates the sound the composer played on the spruce; the rest of the piece developed from there. The entire composition materialized completely naturally — the melody which emerges later is quintessentially Carpathian. The contrast between the so-called avant-garde percussive part and the melody is not meant to create a contradiction; it is a completely natural combination, reaching a synthesis of styles that is naturally present in the environment.