Sebastian Claren: tremblement

The work on tremblement began with the idea of extremely slowing down a string quartet by Brahms–like a tape playing far too slowly. Every detail of the piece, including the vibrato, was to be massively enlarged and, though still directly connected to the original, grotesquely distorted. With the first concrete drafts, it became clear that I couldn’t use Brahms’ material the same way I had in comparable pieces. This may be due to the familiarity of the material, but perhaps more so because of its formal completeness. To maintain the idea of a direct connection to Brahms’ music, I had to find ways to make it work in a space that was far more abstract than I had planned. Through these structural and sonic decisions, the piece evolved in many ways into the opposite of its original idea. Instead of an extreme slowing down, many tempos are so fast that they need to be adjusted for real performance. And although every single note of the piece refers to a specific place in the first movement of Brahms’ string quartet Op. 51, No. 2, this connection is barely recognizable over long stretches.

 

The title tremblement, originally a reference to Édouard Glissant, gradually became a metaphor for all sorts of trembling movements, many of which are very concrete and direct, sometimes even violent. The piece has become a battleground of extremely conflicting forces, meeting in a structurally claustrophobic space.

(Sebastian Claren)