Ut-Sons (Sea Songs)

Niels Rosing-Schow's Ut-Sons (Sea Songs) for Guitar Duo (2016).

Commissioned by 'OpenDays Festival' for the guitar duo Per Dybro Sørensen and Michael Norman.

Programme note
The work has been written for a first performance at the Utzon Center in Aalborg, Denmark. It is an important aspect of the work that it must communicate with the building's remarkable architecture. The title is a play on words on the name Utzon. Ut - Sons (French Ut = the note C) means 'C - sounds', and the note C is the centre of the opening music, which returns several times in the first half of the piece. C - sounds isdeliberately miss-spelled as Sea Sounds in the subtitle of the work. This expresses the proximity of the sea, which is heard in the music as re-occurring broken chords similar to the sound of small, friendly waves on the beach sand.
In between these easily recognizable musical elements are established 'musical rooms', which are different versions of a common harmonic musical material. The quasi-canonical passages played by the two guitarists are mirroring each other without ever being totally identical, thus reflecting thesubtle broken symmetries of the building.

(Niels Rosing-Schow, 2016)