Little Life (2024)

When the Carl Nielsen Quintet approached me about commissioning this piece they had a specific wish: they wanted to play melodies. I have tried to solve this paradox with a transparent, floating and polytonal texture, where the individual instrument plays its lines turning the overall musical structure into a pulsating organ that contracts and opens.

In this way the melodies become fibers in a unified whole, and the music becomes the image of the individual musician's breathing behind their instrument – or images of emerging life just before the break of dawn.

Phillip Faber, 2024