Swiss prize and audience prize of the OFSI 30th Anniversary Composition Competition

Dark is the Horizon is a work for wind orchestra based on one of my most intimate poem. From the beginning to the end, the piece uses two motives and their variations as material. The poem pictures a character alone and lost in a storm who turns out to be her/his own life, her/his own fears, her/his own demons. At first, the character feels the storm coming in a slow but inexorable way. Then, the hurricane appears and covers everything. The lightning creates twisted shadows who start to perform a strange “danse macabre”. After a powerful rise of tension, what one would call the chorus appears. It is harmonically simpler and represents the character’s will to go on.

However, in the middle of the work, the tempest becomes so violent that the character can no longer face it and begs to be destroyed by it. Here I used the octatonic scale to obtain threatening melodic lines. Finally, the storm dissipates and there is eventually nothing left of the main character.

While the storm progresses, a completely different atmosphere can be found in two specific places in the work. I see these two symmetric moments as “peaceful islands”. There, the character’s memories replace the dark mood by thoughts of past joy, of smiles and love as well as familiar sound (like the sound of the traditional cowbell, even though it is distant and muffled). However, even if these islands are intended to be emotionally strong passages, they are insufficient to balance the darkness of the horizon.


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