Amalgamations

"Amalgamations" for chamber orchestra was written in summer 2021 as a commission of the Tyrolean Chamber Orchestra Innstrumeni in cooperation with the Austrian Society for Contemporary Music for the concert "Aggregate" in the context of the festival Zeitimpuls at the ORF Innsbruck. In doing so, the present composition takes up this title. 

The process of amalgamation means the extraction of the nobler metal from a basic substance by changing its state of aggregation. Thus, with the help of mercury, which evaporates during this process, gold or silver, for example, can be extracted from ores. But amalgamation can mean more than that: In alchemy, for example, the term "amalgama" was also understood as the symbolization of physical union. For me, it was primarily this merging into something more valuable that inspired me to write this composition, which, while focusing on this intrinsically chemical process, does not use it in the sense of program music, but rather focuses on the philosophical-transcendental level, reflecting on this process more than tracing it, so to speak. 

There is a series of chords that run through the entire piece like a common thread, increasingly changing and also affecting the time signatures, rhythm and melodic formation through their often numerical symbolic meaning. Finally, in the last section, they "dissolve" into a twelve-tone row, which can be clearly heard in the cellos and basses, although I do not use it in the sense of dodecaphony. Also, aleatoric patterns that run simultaneously with conventionally notated passages symbolize in their interweaving the process of amalgamation as I hear, see and understand it for myself.