frontside compositions

Rain Heart Hammer

Jonatan Sersam

performing musicians

We are delighted that Sveriges Radio P2 is partnering with us in 2025, as their commissioned work by Jonatan Sersam will result in a premiere at our festival.

The new piece by Jonatan Sersam has a setting for clarinet and string trio and will be performed by Karin Dornbusch, Cecilia Zilliacus, Ylvali McTigert Zilliacus and Kati Raitinen.

Jonatan’s comment after the composition is finished:
“In Edith Sitwell’s poem, which forms the basis for Britten’s “Still Falls the Rain” – performed alongside my piece – there is a line that gave me much to ponder:

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat

Although the poem uses rain in a symbolic, metaphorical, and probably quite dramatic sense, I chose to contemplate the very transformation of the sound itself. How rain begins, first in a whisper, then intensifies, and finally, becomes indistinguishable from the individual drops. How rain can have a regular pulse, almost a steady fall, or simply be a furious mass crashing down. If you truly listen to the rain, you might allow the sound to become heartbeats, hammer strokes, harmonic pizzicatos, or light tremolos.

In the first movement, the music leads into different “tone modules,” interrupted by a sweeping gesture, perhaps like a flock of birds suddenly rising far away. The gesture draws nearer, and ultimately sweeps us into the second movement. This movement begins with tone drops in the strings, and a kind of horizon in the clarinet, which develops into deep, rumbling chords and darker music.

The third movement is a perpetuum mobile – a persistent rain of notes. Sequences where the notes refuse to come in the same order twice, over an unstable intonated bass line. Much like the first movement’s upward gesture, everything is swept upward into the highest register and finally disappears – much like a rain that fades away.”

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