Waft (2006/2007) for tenor saxophone and piano

- durata ca. 8 min
- to Rei Nakamura and Eliot Gattegno
- premiered in Graz on 23rd February 2007

EN
The chromatic scale as it is, in its basic, stepwise form: this is what Waft is largely about. I like to regard
the chromatic scale as a kind of raw but self-sufficient musical material endowed with particular energy and lacking drama (i.e. sentimentalism). Still, there is something unmistakably human about it: giving, for example,  little credence to opinions which consider the harmonic series or just intonation as something “natural” and the tempered system as something “mechanized” or “alienated”, I find the “perfect imperfection” of the chromatic scale moving and intimately close. Like it or not, we are humans with all what it implies, and music doesn’t grow in the forests.
One possible answer to the question “What is piano?” is: A materialized scale, a repetition machine. One possible answer to the question “What is saxophone?” is: A specific device for coloring breath with tone. Waft makes the instruments become one, a symbiotic sonic creature.