Processes of Becoming.

A note to "Deaths and Entrances"

"I make one image, though "make" is not the right word; I
let, perhaps, an image be made emotionally in me & then apply to it what
intellectual and critical forces I possess; let it breed another; let that
image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two,
a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal
limits, conflict." (Dylan Thomas)

Deaths and Entrances for sopranosaxophone and ensemble begun with
the first bar of Arnold Schönbergs Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op.19. This bar
was chosen, or rather manifested itself in my head, as startingpoint of a long
compositional process. I heard this bar as a perfect micro-composition, and
after a while it got fertilized by my own musical creativity. It started
proliferating, mostly as writing excercises, in various processes of
manipulations and distillations towards a composition for saxophone and
ensemble. The music was moulded into three movements, reflecting three
different readings of the same basic structures, phantasmagorical and dreamlike
visions of the Schöberg bar in different textural surroundings. This an be
represented as a fairly traditional concerto-form: An energtic first movement
with improvised solocadenza, a lyrical second movement (pastorale!) and a last
movement with rhythmical focus. This is of course a banal version of the form,
but the form nevertheles reveals attempts to find simple ways of grasping a
complex material.

During the composing of this piece I read the poetry of Dylan
Thomas, and found much inspiration in his hermetic, yet colorfull poetry. I
found a statement of his poetics in his collected poems (cited above), and
it gave words to my own relationship to the compositional processes.  So I appropriated the title from
Thomas' poem and book by the name Deaths and Entrances. And I hope that I
have managed to get hold of some of the qualities of this poetry: The obviously
significant statements that  at the
same time are hermetic; the reader can sense a latent, high-tempered
expressivity, a will to communicate, but is at the same time unable to grasp
exactly what its all about.