W Klepsydrze for cello, vibraphone and harp (2019) 

​W Klepsydrze, meaning “inside the hour-glass” in polish is a trio for cello, harp and vibraphone in which the cello takes a leading role. As the title suggest, the piece deals with the idea of time as the image of an hourglass is a common symbolic representation of time, especially within surrealist painting - which was a major inspiration for this work. The piece is organized in a web of cues originating from the cellist that synchronise the three instruments into an organic fabric. W Klepsydrze is written in a single continuous movement in which three phases can be distinguished. The first phase begins with short bursts of sound followed by long silences or by the ringing out of resonance, the process of this first phase gradually inverts this balance, with sound taking up increasingly large portions of time and the silences becoming shorter. This process brings us towards the second phase, in which the silences have disappeared and the sound is continuous yet the music has not reached a flowing state, a syncopated perpetual motion in the cello part is here either interrupted by echos in the other instruments, or frozen through the use of repeatedly arpeggiating chords or slow glissandos which modulate towards new tonalities. Two new “characters” are furthermore introduced in the harp and vibraphone parts, namely: a downwards glissando in the harp and a bowed sustained glassy tone in the vibraphone. The process within this phase is a slow morphing of the texture of the music, the interruptions become sparser leading to the cello playing longer and longer stretches of the syncopated perpetual motion, and the material of the harp and vibraphone goes from merely echoing the cello part to breaking away into their own personal idiomatic modes of playing. This process leads to the final phase. The once homogenous ensemble (in terms of material) is now stratified into three frozen strands: the perpetual motion of the cello stops and freezes on a single held droning pitch, the harp fixates on descending glissandos, gradually increasing their density and their range, and the vibraphone plays loops of bowed harmonies. This phase marks the formal culmination of the piece and is succeeded by a short coda which takes the very beginning of the piece and condenses the fragments into a single phrase. With the first note, the hourglass is flipped and time starts flowing. At first time seems stopped and in motion simultaneously while the balance between the two levels of the hourglass slowly even-out. The more the piece progresses the more it becomes clear that the inevitability of the flow of time is nearer as the lower part of the hour-glass becomes visibly almost full. With the emptying of the upper compartment, the musical time freezes, and we enter a state of culmination and suspension simultaneously. Only waiting for the hourglass to be flipped again and the process to repeat. W Klepsydrze was premiered by the Score Collective Ensemble conducted by Mirari Etxeberria Guerrero during the Composers Festival 2023.