In composing my new work, Skizzen (Sketches), I took inspiration from Beethoven’s famous sketchbooks that survive in libraries around the world. Drawing from sketches and material from his fifth symphony, I sought not to re-compose Beethoven’s music, but instead to reference his ideas in raw form, when they were merely flashes of inspiration and not yet developed into one of the most significant compositions Beethoven was to create. As they appear in his sketchbooks, these fragments are incomplete, disconnected, and often in only rough outline form. Some pages are curiously barren; others densely covered with chaotic scribbles, scratches, headless note-stems, and messy inkblots. Similarly, Skizzen presents a selection of Beethoven’s musical fragments, at times distinctly recognizable and elsewhere transformed, emerging from and returning to a haze of obscurity. Certain musical moments appear in just brief flashes; others spin off into new directions and interpretations, much as a composer explores the potentialities of a musical germ during the composition process. One might listen as one would view a faded and brittle document that captured the very initial sparks of a masterpiece, some 200 years ago.
