To be busy with the past means not necessarily nostalgie or conservatism. This would be only true if you look on tradition and progress like a pair of opposite, if you can discover in the past only the sediments and not the potential, if you would interpretate the history of music (and all history?) as a one-lined progression, as a systematic development from inferiority to superiority, so as an arrow and not as a network, which connects ideas, materials, archetyps over the centuries.
Sept Variations works with elements, moments, materials of seven compositions of the past (Schumann, Janáček, Debussy, Schumann, Schubert, Mahler, Schumann). At the time of composing this pieces were very close to me, persecuted me, and that's the reason for their choice.
In the literal sense of "variation" I 'varied' the given with the help of seven very different procedures: I put own materials contrasting against the original (I), made a new interpretation of harmony, stretching time (II), changed progression into simultaneousness (III), isolated rhythm (IV), used a very strong magnifier (V), separated tones and fused it into soundscapes (VI), aliened a harmonical corpus (VII).
So the originals are recognizable in different grades and extents, then flash up shortly like found again jewels, now perhaps with a deeper experience; the originals are no quotations but moments come to theirselves, arised from a strange context, which hit and blured their presence.
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