TANZENDES LICHT / Dancing Light

for solo trumpet, big band and string orchestra

Dancing Light (2007) was commissioned by the Camerata Bern and the Swiss Jazz Orchestra, as a homage to Paul Klee. After initially feeling that a direct reference to Klee’s paintings would be unfitting, I saw an inner image that I wanted to set to music. Most people will be familiar with this: one is standing by a large stretch of water, a lake, or by the sea. The sun is setting and one sees a streak of lights across the water: thousands of small dancing sparks of light. This image has often touched me deeply. It has something of the eternal journey of the soul. The sparks appear and are gone again in a flash, but all the dancing sparks together are life, full of impulsive strength.
I then sat down at the piano and found a simple musical figure in 9/8 time, from which the whole piece evolved. The figure is almost always present, and connects various moments. I deliberately kept the 9/8 time throughout the composition, and thus discovered many possibilities in this rhythmic structure. Apart from the solo trumpet, I wanted to introduce as many soloists from the Jazz Orchestra as possible, so as to make the piece very colorful.
The homage to Klee is an artistic one – Klee too would surely have focused on his very own impressions and ideas. What would he have felt when listening to Tanzendes Licht?

In 2011 we saw a performance of TANZENDES LICHT by the famous dutch Metropole Orkest at the Holland Festival, performed at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam under the direction of Jules Buckley. For this occasion the instrumentation has been enlarged, and a CD has been released of this performance.