Feast During a Plague

‘This work was the result of a commission from the Swedish Concert Institute (Svenska Rikskonserter) for the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet and the Kroumata Percussion Ensemble. These ensembles gave the work its first performance in Stockholm on 12th February 1994.
The combination of these two ensembles as such gave me the idea of providing the piece with a sort of musical-theatrical action: expectation and meeting.
I had two different processes of sound generation at my disposal: the most immediate process (the breathing of the musicians on their wind instruments) and an indirect one (sound production by means of drumsticks, bows, rubber bouncing balls etc. on percussion instruments).
In spite of all the contrasts between these two processes, there is at the same time the possibility of compromise between them, the possibility of meeting at a point of common ground. I took this possibility as the basic idea of the compositional development: what seems to be a similar sound (a 'saxophone pizzicato' is reminiscent of the sound of temple blocks) gradually develops into an obvious contrast. After we have passed through a 'dangerous region', we finally arrive at a genuine, natural commonality of the instruments, at a 'consonance of tonal colour': saxophone harmonies in dialogue with flexatones and suspended cymbals, both played with double-bass bows. Unpredictable chordal mixtures of adjacent notes from the spectrum of tinny sounds are produced both by the threedimensional metal plates of certain percussion instruments and also by the curved shapes of the saxophone reeds.
In this way a sort of development of the relationships between the linear and non-linear spectrums is accomplished. The linear spectrum affects distance and opposition; the non-linear spectrum affects similarity and togetherness.
The compositional course of the work also unfolds in expectation of this togetherness and, in effect, determines its form.” (Sofia Gubaidulina)