hic / nunc
[Lapsus memoriae XI: palinsesto su due memoria immaginari]
Curtain call after the concert performance at Music Biennale Zagreb. [Photo credits: Matej Grgić]
Instrumentation
Clarinet [Bb / Bass], Saxophone [Sop. / Alt.] / Guzheng / Electric Guitar / Violin / Viola / Cello / Piano / Percussion
Duration
15 minutes
I. hic [after Luke Laurila]
II. nunc [after William Hallworth-Cook]
Commissioned by the 33rd Music Biennale Zagreb and the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, with sponsorship from the CASH Music Fund
Première
12th April 2025; 33rd Music Biennale Zagreb
Concert Worlds Connect, at Tvornica Kulture, Zagreb, Croatia
Linus Fung (cln.), Tan-ching Chiu (gz.), William Lane (vla.), Karen Yu (perc.)
Paolo Coello (sax.), Nuno Marques (e. gtr.), Roberto Alonso (vln.), David Durán (pno.)
Vid Veljak (vc.)
Angus Lee (cond.)
Dedication
To Christian Mason
Score samples
Programme note (excerpt)
Sleep, the ultimate expression of the body’s triumph over the spirit deemed as “profound[ly useless] and intrinsic[ally passive]” (Jonathan Crary, 24/7) faces today persistent threats of both colonisation […] and corrosion […]. Bizarrely, however, it might be in sleep, that “uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism” which functions as the ultimate place of resistance, that we find the integrity of the ‘here and now’ uncompromised by capital: thus, perhaps, is the reply to Ariadne’s question from Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010): “[w]hy is it so important to dream?” In dreams, as the iron grip of real-life physics loosens, time and space abide instead by laws of the sur-real — that is, over-(the)-real — an alternate reality that surpasses, passes over, circumvents, the real: impossible Reutersvärdian spaces crossfolding into and out of one another, while time plastically dilates and stretches towards the infinite: a ‘here’ and ‘now’ where hauntings and visitations coincide as one, when fictive events return with full emotive force as ersatz déjà-vu, and all that is solid melts into air…
Press
“During its fifteen minutes of duration, hic / nunc extends like a great arc of saturated acoustic masses that, in a clearly oriental tone, is progressively born from silence and returns to it […]. The first [section] is born from the piano and percussion, with the rest of the ensemble joining in with a saturation of frictions, harmonics and glissandi in polyrhythmic layers that merge with the electronics as if we were listening, acoustically filtered, to the murmur of the Hong Kong megalopolis […]. After this, the score gradually quiets down in search of silence, evoking a post-new age style […] in the electronics. This grand diminuendo abounds in the interplay of saturated masses and emerging voices that unfold fleeting melodies: landscapes of a lyricism that contrasts sharply with the first part of a work performed with the overwhelming technical perfection of these nine musicians and the total rhythmic control by Angus Lee as conductor […].”
Paco Yáñez,
“[The piece] springs from the electronic part, joined progressive […] by all the instruments, though none of which are entrusted with a melody, only short motifs that are increasingly intertwined. These motifs in themselves are often sharp and dissonant, but together they form a meditative, ethereal and ear-pleasing whole that, despite the length of the work, is never tedious to listen to, but, on the contrary, opens up a dream-like soundscape.”
Alenka Bobinsky,