Basel Composition Competition 2025 3rd Prize

Imagine a very big, huge cathedral, bigger than any other cathedral in the world. Now imagine a little bird flying inside the cathedral and stopping on a balcony. There it begins to sing. What do we hear? Short, granular sounds create a very long reverberation tail that merges with space. What if the dimensions of this cathedral were infinite? What if the building’s architectural space occupied the entire known and even the unknown universe? What about the reverberation time in the infinite space of this cathedral? What about the bird singing an agile, energetic tune from a balcony of this cathedral with infinite reverberation? I like to imagine the conceptual clash between the extremely fast and light sound of the bird, and the response time of the reverberation that lasts to infinity. The granular song of the bird responds to a tail of reverberation that dissolves time, becoming an evocation of eternity.

This work was premiered as part of the BCC 2025 in Basel, Switzerland, on February 1-2, 2025

Basel Chamber Orchestra

Tito Ceccherini, conductor

Publisher: Universal Edition