In Chemins V for guitar and an ensemble of forty-two players (the soloist plays, substantially unaltered, my Sequenza XI for guitar, written in 1987-1988 for Eliot Fisk), my aim was to develop a dialogue between the very idiomatic harmony of the guitar, strongly conditioned by the tuning of the instrument, and another, more extended and non-idiomatic harmonic dimension (the passport for moving between these two distant territories is the interval of augmented fourth). In Chemins V two instrumental idioms are also present: one has its roots in the Flamenco tradition, the other in classical guitar (the bridge between these two “histories” has been my own desire to experiment with an instrument I love). The dialogue between the two harmonic dimensions on one hand and the two instrumental idioms on the other, takes place through a continuous exchange and transformation of specific characters and clearly recognizable figures: the formal plan of Chemins V is therefore rather repetitive. But without repetition and parallelism a dialogue would have neither form nor meaning.

Luciano Berio