Thousand splinters of a human eye (2017 - 2018)

This piece was commissioned by Calefax reed quintet, funded by the Ernst von Siemens music foundation, and premiered by Calefax reed quintet and Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart at Eclat music festival 2018.

It is a scenic piece written for five reed players, five vocalists and a bicycle. Different episodes surrealistically collide into each other forming a realm of symbols, paradoxical meanings and questions, resembling a caricature of life and balancing on the fine border between humor and grotesque. One step to the right, one step to the left - and the roles are not anymore the same.

Bicycle as a metaphor of a dominant system; cycles of situations repeat each other but produce different outcomes. What are the rules of this game? Are the characters full of joy or fear?

The following lines from Paterson by William Carlos Williams weave the episodes through this phantasmagoria:

“Say it! No ideas but in things.”

“Inside the bus one sees
his thoughts sitting and standing.
His thoughts alight and scatter—
Who are these people (how complex the mathematic)
among whom I see myself
in the regularly ordered plateglass
of his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?
They walk incommunicado,
the equation is beyond solution,
yet its sense is clear—
that they may live his thought
is listed in the Telephone Directory -”

The score of the piece, alike the score of my other piece Cositas Diminutas, consists of pages of different transparency, so that several layers could be viewed at once in superimposition. The drawings and notations reflect the world of the piece encrypting music, movements, light and stage directions at the same time. Examples are demonstrated below.

Photo credit: Martin Sigmund

Elena Rykova_thousand splinters.BIG (dragged) 3.jpg

Elena Rykova_thousand splinters.BIG (dragged).jpg

Elena Rykova_thousand splinters.BIG (dragged) 2.jpg

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