Rui C. Antunes
Procession on a Mirrored Floor is based on a Portuguese popular secular religious tradition, common in small villages, that takes place during Lent: every Friday villagers would go out after midnight and sing through the village’s streets in order to remind the ones sleeping to pray for the souls trapped in the purgatory, so that they could ascend to heaven. Besides this tradition, the piece takes inspiration in the work of the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher (1898-1978), and his interpretation of negative space in works using contour figures (such as Lucht en Water I, from 1938).
In Procession on a Mirrored Floor, time takes the music in an oscillation between the perception of an easily identifiable musical object (like a melody or harmony) and its negative (here represented as its inverse), by placing each either in the foreground or in the background. In the context of the piece, these two plans are used as expressive representations of positive and negative spaces.
Positive and negative spaces are not personified by an opposition of matter to void, of being to being not, of sound to silence. Instead, throughout the piece, the objects change their position towards the listener. But despite this change of position towards the listener’s perception, the objects maintain their mutualistic position to each other, which provides their complementary contours (in a similar way to the one used by Escher in his works).
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