Beat Furrer’s “nero su nero”: Swiss and German premieres

nero su nero (black on black): the title of Beat Furrer’s new orchestral work speaks of gradations of darkness, of the nuancing of light, the application of colour without colour, the stratification of pigments, of intensification. A multiple fanned-out overlapping of voices, whose particles rest on quite elementary forms of movement is the colour material. In the composition two great sections composed of heterogeneous elements frame a slow central part which emerges as a great inexorable development leading to a bright, loud, frenetic blaze. A continuous intensification is pared from almost imperceptible alterations, which takes the action to a tremendous dramatic high point.

The structural model, says Beat Furrer, consists of a principle of assembly developed to the highest complexity and yet simplicity: “It is about the creation of melody from the interpolation of heterogeneous elements. In the first part these are two layers; a great colourfulness is created of these two structures interpolated into each other. In the central part there is just one layer. The very long central section is concerned with achieving a continuous alteration of colour instrumentally as well as harmonically – from darkness to light. Within this development there is nevertheless still a structural polyphony of various kinds of movement in the strings, at different speeds with the ascending and descending lines. The sequencing models are based on chromatic and other intervallic combinations which pass by superimposed in the tonal landscape, so that a kind of unending movement of wandering overtones is produced. In the last part the descending chromaticism in the strings is continued, as overtones of a chromatic line.”