...winterlich ruhende Erde...

Programme Note

"...winterlich ruhende Erde..." violoncello solo

"Und ich war scwach und "poetisch" genug, die Brache seines Geistes mit der "winterlich ruhenden Erde" zu vergleichen, in deren Schoss das Leben, neues Sprissen vorbereitend, sich heimlich fortrege..."

Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus

The title of the piece is a quotation of Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus. Mann compares the apparent non-creation of the personage and composer Adrian Leverkusen with the winter sleep of the earth, where a new life starts slowly to grow under the earth, but becoming visible later, long after the process already started.

This metaphor of the visible and invisible world, was an inspiring impulse to work on a kind of process that I would call of organic; that is, processes that due the extreme time expansion are perceived as having no change (almost regulars).

In another context, the sentence of the title is used like a musical poem, where the time flowing is determined by the rhythm of the words:

Win - ter - lich

Ruh - en-de

Er - de

Luis Antunes Pena