The Modern Magnificat to Snow (2021) for vocals, sound objects, glasses/glass harmonica (sounds octave up) and two accordions. Written for Gretli & Heidi.
In this work I have used parts of a poem from a collection of poems “The six-cornered snowflake” by John Frederick Nims. That collection contains six poems that are graphically designed as hexagonal snowflakes. I was inspired by that shape (hexagon), and the abstract mood of the poems, but didn’t want to recreate a similar geometric or graphic shape in my score, rather reflect the mood. I think that snowflakes have a somewhat playful, “swinging” character, at least when they fall slowly, and when I was reading and working on one of the poems, I thought of jazzy swings. That the movement (or fall) of snowflakes can sometimes sound like swing, in the midst of all this serious and gloomy winter atmosphere? Why write about hexagonal snowflakes? In 1611, astronomer Kepler wrote an essay wondering why snowflakes always have perfect hexagonal symmetry. It’s a simple question that no one had asked before, and no one had a good answer for the next three hundred years. As Kepler searched for a suitable answer, he also asked other fascinating questions about physics, maths and biology. So Kepler was a bit ahead of his time and came up with exciting theories about water molecules that are organised in this way.
