Webs In A Stolen Dream

Webs In A Stolen Dream for Chamber Ensemble (1996).

Written for The Nordic Music Season in the UK as a joint commission from the Storstrom's Ensemble, Avanti, Sonanza, CikadaEnsemble and the Composer's Ensemble.

Programme Note

Ever since the first time I read György Ligeti's description of a particular dream he had as a child, this dream haspursued me. Both because for some strange reason it is impossible to get rid of, and because I literally spoken 'dream it' myself now and then.

He writes among other things:

'In my earliest childhood I once dreamt that I couldn't reach my bed (which had bars and was regarded as a safe place of refuge). For the whole room was filled with a thin but dense web, very much like the webwhich the silk butterfly's caterpillar is spun in. Not only I but also other beings were caught in this gigantic net.

When something moved, this made a shaking which spread to the whole system. All aroundinextricable knots were made and at other places cavities where rags of the original web substance was drifting about. The changes of the system were irrevocable: no condition could possibly come back. There was somethingextremely sad about this process, the feeling of hopelessness because of the expiring time and the past which could never be re-made'

In my short piece I only move a little, hesitating distance intothis equivocal world where the beauty of the silk thin net is so totally grown together with the feeling of decay, loss and 'gone time'.

Karl Aage Rasmussen