commission: Concerts Sweden for duo duo Gelland
first perfomance: 22.2.2008 Stockholm New Music Festival 2008, duo Gelland
publisher: Svensk Musik
Madeleine Isaksson's Infra, written for Duo Gelland, is inspired by Roland Barthes' Fragments d'un discours amoureux (A Lovers Discourse) from 1977.
The music has to do with what goes beyond one's control, about the feeling of living without a safety net, and this is also how the work is composed. The various parts succeed each other like the beads in a rosary, expressing states that have to do with direction, but also with loneliness and alienation.
The G string of one violin is tuned down to F, and of the other violin the E string is tuned down to an E flat. This brings out other harmonics, but also another fragility that makes the interplay between the instruments charged, open and unpredictable. The two instruments each play on one of the three eight-note scales that are evenly distributed over an octave, including quarter notes, but they never play exactly the same scale and exactly the same notes. In desire for unity and longing for integration, they simultaneously express their loneliness. This is also expressed in Barthes' passionate and evasive text:
"Throughout any love life, figures occur to the lover without any order, for on each occasion they depend on an (internal or eternal) accident. Confronting each of these incitements (what "befalls" him), the amorous subject draws on the reservoir (the treasure) of figures, depending on the needs, the injunctions, or the pleasures of his image-repertoire. Each figure explodes, vibrates in and of itself like a sound severed from any tune—or is repeated to satiety, like the motif of a hovering music."
Magnus Haglund (Stockholm New Music Festival catalogue , 2008)