Description
Temporality of the Impossible is the first publication emerging from a larger, ongoing project of the same name by the Serbian-born, Brussels-based violinist Dejana Sekulic. The project revolves around recent music that explores the extremity and ambiguity that emerges at the limits of possibility in contemporary violin performance, focusing in particular on repertoire in which the relationship between notation and sound is unconventional, challenging, uncertain, or even confounding, as well as works employing unusual string preparations and tunings. These are works that propose—and at times demand—a reimagining of the role of the interpreter. The seven works presented on this recording exemplify the probing, investigative nature of Sekulic's project.
These pieces by Clara Iannotta, Rebecca Saunders, Liza Lim, Evan Johnson, Cathy Milliken, Aaron Cassidy, and a newly commissioned work for the project by the iconoclastic Italian composer Dario Buccino, bring the raw, quintessential, fragile, and fleeting matter of the violin to the fore, often through novel approaches to the interface between performer, instrument, notation, movement, and sound. With their protean nature, in which the pieces might sound very different from one performance to the next, the function of a recording—which captures only one fixed instantiation—is itself also problematised. Each recording here is a snapshot of only one possible iteration, communicating a particular reading, understanding, and energy of a single moment in time. These recordings are openings.