The Stillpoint

for violin and vibraphone

The basic idea of this work is that two instruments are playing the same melodic material, sometimes in unison, but most of the time put together in asymmetrical rhythms. The piece has four movements, each of them with a subtitle.
The first movement (in the silent croacking night) has a ‘mysterioso’ character. It consists of a melody, based on a six-tone mode, which is played several times in different tempos.
The second movement (as the world turns) is more or less a unisonmelody that increases in tempo step by step. Little banal quotes taken from the massmedia are unrecognisably integrated in the modal sound.
Through an ascending whole tone scale the third movement (a pattern of timeless moments), where this scale plays an important role, is reached. As indicated in the subtitle, this movement is a melodic pattern consisting of little mosaic-stones with mutually different characteristics; slow or fast, resoluto or mysterioso, unison or just about unison, molto brutale or adagio desolato. This last germ cell (adagio desolato) will slowly grow to a high, final melody in the fourth movement.
The final movement (the point of intersection of the timeless with time) opens with an enormous fortissimo where the vibraphonist lets a glissando ring. From the chromatic field that is sounding, one by one notes are being demped which I call a ‘negative’ melody (instead of a series of played tones set against a silent background (ordinary melody), now there are a series of silenced tones against a background consisting of all tones of the vibraphone ringing).
This point is the climax of the work. It is the pivot on which everything hangs.
The Stillpoint was premiered in May 1995 in the IJsbreker in Amsterdam.

Click here for audio examples 1 and 2 of the work