This piece was born from a close collaboration with Mari Kimura. She is not just an amazing violinist, but she has developed a sensor which she wears on her right wrist, on the arm with which she holds the bow. This means that the sensor can detect all sorts of information, and I had to think about all that information and how I wanted to use it and incorporate into the music. This was a great challenge. During the many hours of working together with Mari, I must have written enough music for 3 violin works to try everything out, then I threw them away. How many “premieres” did we do? I lost count. Because neither of us liked the first few “premieres” (even though she is too polite to say anything, I was sure I didn’t like them) I started composing again from scratch, trying again. She was willing to do all that, and to fit everything into her busy schedule.
Then Covid happened. All our schedules became empty. I wrote to her, saying “the universe is telling us, we must work on this piece again now, every day, even though we have had our official “premieres”.
So, we started working again, from scratch. Finally, we arrived that moment, where both of us - I could tell from my computer screen, looking at her reaction, exclaimed, “YES, this is it!”.
Dai Fujikura (edited by Alison Phillips)