Polygonal is a piece of music that currently is the main artistic outcome of the project "Borderlands", for the Gratwanderung exhibition curated by Kunstform Wissenschaft:
kunstform-wissenschaft.org/borderlands.

It is an abstract piece that doesn’t rely on specific traditional languages, although traditional elements do appear. As a matter of fact, the form of the composition falls into a category that has no name, and probably doesn’t amount to a “tradition”, but has been used by many composers.

The first that comes to mind is Rebecca Saunders, a superb British composer living and working in Berlin, and I’d like to use her words to describe her idea of “sonic sculptures”. Those are the program notes of her concerto “Still”:

"Fragments, each time slightly varied, gradually create a single image. Imprints reiterated and projected into time and space. Like a giant mobile seen from many perspectives, that in itself remains untouched. And light changes, the focus, and the position from which perceived, is altered, as is nearness and distance to the object - a manifest complex protraction of the one single thing.

Still, as in stasis, explores two starkly contrasting states, in a fragile state of equilibrium.

Still refers to the framing of sound with silence, of „stillness“ imagined - silence being an endless potential, waiting to be revealed and made audible. The act of composing being to unveil, make visible. Pulling gently on the fragile thread of sound, drawing out from the depths of imagined silence; or alternatively, sound erupting from the stasis of relative silence."

I read in Rebecca’s words some fundamental aspects of my own piece. The “giant mobile” glimpsed from different perspectives is never fully reached, at least not in a stable and tranquil way: the tension towards it is what drives the piece forward. The point of view progresses through a series of movements along the sides of an enclosing polygon; each segment is followed and preceded by rests, the corners of the polygon. The substance of the music is the dialectic relationship between the moving subject and the centre, a dialectics often driven by contrast and tension: perhaps the whole piece can be imagined as a series of (impossible) attempts at crossing the borderland that divides the listener and “the one single thing”.

As a final note, the fixed harmonic foundation of the piece has been influenced by the drones that appear in Armenian and Azeri music. Furthermore, many of the timbres are the result of my own effort to design sounds freely inspired by the duduk's timbre.

The audio track should be listened to on a full-range, flat-response, stereo audio system.