Look and Listen
The Sound Over The Sea (2022)
Marie Samuelsson
Composed for The Sound Ensemble
Premiered by The Sound Ensemble (2/20/22), Seattle, Washington, USA Conductor: Bobby Collins
This new piece explores a contemporary music language reflected in an old blues and an old tune from Dalarna, simultaneously. The blue notes of blues and the natural third used in the Swedish tune, have a lot in common and they meet easily across the sea.
Solastalgia (2020)
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
Commissioned by the festival "Muzikos Ruduo" 2020
Quite often I find ideas hidden within a word that I've never encountered before. Solastalgia is a recently coined term that immediately evoked my imagination with its meaning as well as the sound of the words itself.
Solastalgia has its origins in the concepts of "solace" and "desolation". The meaning of solace is connected to the alleviation of distress or the provision of comfort or consolation in the face of distressing events. Desolation is related to abandonment and loneliness. The suffix -algia has connotations of pain or suffering. hence, solastalgia is a form of "homesickness" like that experienced with traditionally defined nostalgia, except that the victim has not left their home or home environment. Solastalgia, simply put, is "the homesickness you have when you are still at home". The term is related to the anguish caused by environmental changes and global warming. it acquired some new meanings throughout the time of the global pandemic where we all have been experience a lack of solace and longing for life itself as we've known it.
The concept of nostalgia is one of the essential components that has been threaded through my work and solastalgia conveys yet another gradation, another layer of it.
