In Dramstadt Summer Academy 2016 I was waiting for a concert to start. The person sitting next to me seemed like she didn’t want to miss a second of what was happening around her and she wanted to get to know me too. Her name is Dejana Sekulić, she is a violinist and the very last thing I heard before the concert started, was “I’m interested in the temporality of the impossible”. I can’t remember anything else of that concert, because that must be one of the coolest titles I’ve ever heard.

So, I composed a piece for her called “Impossibilitie [date].” In Dejana’s own words: “The piece is quite literally a forever-changing piece – its form (“score”) is a video generated from extremely various sources, appearing in front of the performer (and the audience) for the first time only in the very moment of the performance itself.”

The concept of the temporality of the impossible opens up the imagination and points out many things I love and hate about music written for violin. As a composer, I like to be nice to the musicians, but in this case being nice means not being nice, which made the composition process somehow stressful but also interesting. The “temporality” cancels the “impossible”; someone will always rehearse the unplayable. However, I decided to use the time dimension exactly to create the impossibility, the practice and preparation are now exactly the things that you do not have. It isn’t improvisation either; it is failing with great virtuosity. 

“Impossibilities of the 25022020” for solo violin was written inspired by and for the ”Temporality of the Impossible”, Dejana Sekulić‘s artistic PhD research, taking place at the CeReNeM and ReCePP, at the University of Huddersfield (UK).

Performances (all premieres)

3/6/2019 at la Cité internationale des arts, Paris, France

25/2/2020 at the university of Huddersfield, England