Violence and Longing (2020)
(for orchestra)

Violence and Longing was commissioned by the Musical Academy of the National-Theatre-Orchestra Mannheim and premiered there in November 2021. The work was written before the Covid19 pandemic, yet for a long time I have felt a certain diffuse desire for a kind of "coming home", for the feeling that we are in the right place. At the same time, however, we have long been surrounded by monstrous violence. I feel a deep sense of absence, of loss of what could perhaps be called a spiritual or ethical centeredness among us and this for a very long time. Music of course exits in a non-verbal realm and the world as I experience it reveals itself to me in sounds, but these were some of the things I was thinking about when writing the piece. The G-major "ghost", which opens the piece, is a reference to the opening of the Beethoven G major concerto, but in Schubert's more transparent voicing from his late sonata. This distant memory recedes in the course of the first eleven bars, overtaken by my own sonic worlds. The piece is organized in a series of metrically interwoven sections, what I refer to as "rooms", each with individual characteristics yet all interrelated. Lines, harmonies and rhythms can evolve and transform on numerous levels simultaneously, moving forward as a large, polyphonically pulsating whole. The focus is constantly in motion, from large tutti passages to intimate soli and moments of chamber music. 

Sidney Corbett
Schwetzingen, December 2021