Details

Duration: 8 minutes

Premiere of first version: March 17, 2017, by the A-Trio at the Domforum Koeln (Germany)

Premiere of revised version: June 20, 2021 by the A-Trio at the Chorforum Essen (Germany)

About the work (short program note)

ENGLISH

LUNA is a musical sketch envisioning a futuristic, permanent human colony on the Moon. I imagined the strange “new normal” that lunar settlers would face – watching our home planet from afar, getting used to moonquakes, long days, weightlessness – and how these experiences would shape the music that is created there. LUNA is an attempt to imagine the spirit of something that does not yet exist - lunar music. 

DEUTSCH

LUNA ist eine musikalische Skizze, die eine futuristische, dauerhafte menschliche Kolonie auf dem Mond vorstellt. Ich habe mir das seltsame "neue Normal" vorgestellt, dem sich lunare Siedler stellen würden - unser Heimatplanet aus der Ferne betrachten, sich an Mondbeben, lange Tage und Schwerelosigkeit gewöhnen - und wie diese Erfahrungen die dort entstehende Musik prägen würden. LUNA ist ein Versuch, den Geist von etwas zu erahnen, das noch nicht existiert - Mondmusik.

About the work (longer program note)

LUNA was written for the A-Trio, an ensemble of Russian musicians living in Germany. Back in 2015, while reading the news, I came across something that peaked my interest: the Russian Space Corporation (Роскосмос) had announced a plan to establish a permanent human colony on the Moon by the year 2030. Several other nations - including Japan, China and the USA - had announced similar projects over the years.

I began to think about this idea, and its possible implications for human culture. An intriguing question came to mind: if a human settlement on the Moon is developed, would works of art be created there? What would the music made by inhabitants of such remote colonies sound like, especially as they start to call the Moon their permanent home?

I started to imagine a music that combined well-known elements of the Western tradition with new patterns and concepts, these being an expression of the profoundly different daily-life experiences of living on the Moon. I heard, in my mind, a lonesome song, performed with a view of a lunar night sky. Later in the piece, a strange pulsating music, maybe a subtle depiction of a process of lunar tectonics. Connecting between these two musical moments, a third idea: a weightless, oscillating motive, perpetually shifting back and forth between two harmonies; swaying, gently and forever, eventually getting lost into a cosmic silence…

From these imagined scenarios, a primitive “sketch” started to emerge; a voyage into an unexplored compositional region. LUNA, for me, became a musical fantasy about a distant - yet still human - reality.