Sotelo: Wall of light red, für Saxophon und Ensemble

In the late 1990s, the Irish painter Sean Scully exhibited a series of pictures which, as I see them, are among the most intense images of all in modern painting. Passion for painting and art in general have also been the common denominator during my years of friendship with Beat Furrer; that moved me to borrow the name for my piece from Scully.

To me, Wall of light red – for Beat Furrer is a new look at or perspective on sonic material, which I began to develop with my previous musical essay Chalan. Permit me here to quote Scully himself, whose working concept is currently very close to my own musical one:  “I am trying to give light a feeling of body… the words light and spirit are interchangeable in my opinion. I’m trying to capture something that has a classical stillness and at the same time has enough emotion or dissonance to create an unresolved quality …”.

Beat Furrer’s person and his work have been a central point of my compositional and personal experience since 1984. On the one hand, since the time when his scores first fell into my hands, I have felt enormous admiration for his sonic universe; it is strongly appealing to me – it always bears me into its profound interior, yet at the same time it radiates enormous energy from that deep source. Nor is my admiration any less for the person who, like an apparition of “red light,” emerges as an extraordinary musician: sensitively intelligent, immeasurably munificent, full of joie de vivre and with firm ethical principles. Beat Furrer and I have been bonded together in warm friendship for 20 years.

Mauricio Sotelo