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.

Programmenote
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. Thetitle 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 - soundsisdeliberately 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 beachsand.
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 twoguitarists are mirroring each other without ever being totally identical, thus reflecting thesubtle broken symmetries of the building.

(Niels Rosing-Schow, 2016)