Retonica

As I was writing this piece, I became interested in thinking about the whole notion of tonality. I had spent many years prior to this doing experimental works and I found that I was being drawn back to the idea of a tonic, which for me is always ‘do’ or C, and also the idea of a tonic as a restorative or re-energizing element. I wrote the work just before my ensemble piece Clocks, and in many ways the two works are related: both contain sections of clock-like mechanistic material. This was one of the first big pieces I had written to that date, and in some ways this reassessment of tonality was a great release for me -- it was the first of many works that came like a flood in the following years. It is also one of the first works where I reduced all the materials to their barest and simplest form. I used that distilled point of single focus as a base (or tonic) over which I re-assembled the work, always mindful to not lose that simplicity I had worked so hard to gain.


Elena Kats-Chernin


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