Khôra

‘”Sometimes it happens in life that you really want to fulfil some of your desires, but years go by before the opportunity arises and your dream comes true. When I was a student I used to go to a very small room on the top floor of the Kyiv Conservatory, where I would sometimes have a couple of hours alone with the harpsichord. But it was only years later, when I met Dmytro Kokoshynskyy, that I dared to write a piece for this mysterious instrument. As often happens in my music, many stylistic models appear and are transformed into something new. In this piece I want to create a continuous flow, similar to the eternal flow of a waterfall. The melody flows, washed by harmonies, and it has no edge. It flows, falling into rivers of wave-like chords that overwhelm it in splashes of harmonic cascades. I like this comparison with water, because in this piece the harmony slips from your fingers like water, and as you try to follow one wave, you catch yourself thinking how you missed another, and suddenly a little rainbow lights up the musical canvas, confirming the reality of what is happening with its presence.

This stylistic cascade can immediately confuse the attentive listener’s ear. However, once we have surrendered to this flow and gone through a stormy development, we find ourselves in a new lake of four voices, where the original theme sounds doubled and around it, like shoals of fish, as a symbol of new life, two new themes are formed, transforming the original two voices into a more complex and refined musical structure.

Life in KHORA* is somewhere between styles, at least between the styles that are familiar to our ears. Probably this is where my musical thought is, it is born somewhere we are not and somehow miraculously manifests itself in our reality”.

* (in Ancient Greek: χώρα, romanized: khṓrā is the space where something is, or any generic place.)

Maxim Shalygin 

October 2024