Kent Olofsson - Composer

Crystals of Time (2021)

For piano and live electronics. 15 min.

Written for Signe Olofsson

Crystals of Time was composed for Signe for her graduation concert. I myself had my graduation concert in composition 30 years ago, right here in the Rosenberg Hall. Now Signe, my daughter, is graduating. I have followed her entire musical development, from her first notes on the piano, until now, when we meet, in what I have been doing all her life, composing and exploring new music. A strange and contradictory feeling arises, that a very long time has passed, and at the same time not. The location, the concert hall, allows me to experience it as the same time, or as if time has gone in a circle and come back, to the same time and place.

Crystals of Time is also part of a larger ongoing art project about time, space, faith and hidden dimensions. The project, entitled Zonen (The Zone), consists of film, performing arts and music and is based on Tarkovsky's film Stalker. In the film, three men enter the forbidden and deadly zone, a writer, a physics professor and Stalker, the guide, to find the mythical room that is said to be able to fulfil our innermost desires.

Tarkovsky's films have a distinctive, enigmatic and poetic cinematic language, with spiritual dimensions. He often worked with long takes and vast landscapes. His special editing technique creates different relationships and experiences of time, the films dissolve the chronological and narrative. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze writes that films are images of time and he uses the concept of crystalline time, time crystals.

In Crystals of Time, I have taken these ideas as my starting point and have drawn inspiration from Tarkovsky's films. The electronics move the piano sounds throughout the room, becoming elongated landscapes. Some sounds stop, freezing time. Temporal processes become spatial. The piece cuts between parts that almost seem to stand still, to parts that rush away, as if in flight. The circularity of form is central, we move, but at the same time we are in the same place, in the same space, in the same time. Just as with our graduation concerts in the Rosenberg Hall.