I’m moving on. Now comes a piece that is a little smaller, primarily composition-wise – any configuration (at least a duet) of flute, tuba, cello and guitar. For the Mintaka Festival in Toruń, not unrelated to Nicolaus Copernicus. I was told that I didn’t need to bother with this Copernicus, which I received with relief. But having started thinking about it, somehow I couldn't stop; I began reading about various Copernican theories and theorems and something came to mind after all. It is about rotation, but not of celestial bodies; it's about the rotation of two circles of different radii, the smaller of which revolves around the circumference of the larger, keeping with it a single point of contact. Copernicus investigated the shapes determined by a point on the circumference of the smaller circle, assuming different ratios of the two radii, and discovered a regularity: at a 2:1 ratio of radii the shape is a straight line, which is the diameter of the larger circle. It is not a spectacular discovery and it is not without reason that this is not what Copernicus is known for. Besides, he was not the only one who made it, he just did not know about the discoveries of others (as he was staying in Toruń). 

And it made me think of another Nicholas – Slonimsky – who studied, so to say, the melodic shapes determined by divisions of the octave into different, equally sized pieces. And it was not so much that he discovered any regularity here as that he catalogued the results in the form of a collection of scales and melodic patterns (Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns). I came across this collection some time ago and didn’t think for a long time that there would be anything of interest in it. But I started to play these scales and harmonisations and I changed my mind.

And this in turn reminded me of my own experiment from a long while back. It was still before I started to study that I had this thought to investigate the sound properties of combinations of all triads: in different subversions and interval relations. I planned the thing systematically, as if I were looking for the cipher to a lock – every possible combination going up the chromatic scale from C. I spent a few weeks on it, wasted a few sheets of A3 sheet music paper and found nothing inspiring there at the time. Absolutely, completely nothing.

In addition, I am reading Wesele. And also I’m reading about Wyspiański. I’m looking for the key. And I can hear vuvuzelas.

(transl. Magdalena Małek-Andrzejowska)