Dialogue: I and You

‘I owe the name of this work to my enthusiasm while reading the book ‘I and You’ by Martin Buber. He writes:

‘To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks. The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words. The one primary word is the combination ‘I – You’, the other ‘I – It’. Man is a being who is aware of his place in the universe. This is a being that strives to approach the world and to experience it. But more important than anything is that he is aware of the relationship between himself and this world.
In every act of our touch with nature, people and spiritual entities we see the fringe of the eternal You, we are aware of a breath from the eternal You. There are two main metacosmic movements in the world-building: expansion and attraction, striving for unity - they find their human realization, their higher spiritual form in this relationship: I - You.’

Reading such reflections, it thrilled me that all this has a direct relation to the art of music, to the life of the sounding matter. Twofoldness: Its aspiration to expand to infinity, and on the other hand, the unwavering desire to concentrate around a center and to fix it. The twofoldness of the desires of the sounding substance itself and the drama within the sounding forms. This is obvious to me. Fortunately, all these my deliberations coincided with an initiative of two great musicians of our time, Vadim Repin and Andres Mustonen - to create something together for violin and orchestra. This initiative hit the hottest point of all reflections on Martin Buber's dialogic anthropology. To create a dialogue. A dialogue between the ‘I’ of the soloist and the ‘I’ of the conductor of the orchestra.
Music is such a kind of art, where purely abstract entities begin to experience their own life drama. Twofoldness. In this case it is about interval relations within chord and melody constructions. The most important contrast here is the successively expanding or contracting construction. In the course of the seven variations (and the work is built just in this form) the question of expansion or contraction is solved differently. You will hear.
The striving for expansion of the intervals in the course of the melody or chord line or, on the contrary, the striving for contraction lead to certain consequences and solutions (not my own solutions, as I see it, but solutions coming from the sounding matter itself). Exactly these sequences and solutions shape the structuring moments of the form. You will hear this. But I wish you to direct your attention to two points.
One prepares the central episode of the form. The soloist rises to the highest register on the scale of major sevenths. The chordal echo forms the most extended sonic space in this stepwise passage. And the second moment, just before the coda.
The sound stream strives towards the centre of the orchestral diapason. And there, in the centre, it forms the maximum compressed interval space.
Twofoldness. In essence, this is the basic question of the conversation between the ‘I’ of the soloist and the ‘I’ of the conductor. The question of twofoldness and drama that emerges from this conflict. The question: What is the meaning of this world-encompassing desire for expansion to infinity and the equally strong attraction to the center, to the center of the cross of the relationship I and You.
Martin Buber: ‘We can puzzle darkly about the metacosmic original form of this twofoldness - the separation from the origin and the approach to the origin. But our knowledge of the twofoldness falls silent before the paradox of the primary mystery.’
(Sofia Gubaidulina)