Instrumentation:
Violin and Piano

Durata:
7' 00''

Commissioned by Rohm Music Foundation.
First performance by Bjarne Magnus Jensen and Lina Feldberg Braaten, 13.05.05 at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo.

Elegy for Mr./Mrs. Ciona Intestinalis (2005) was commissioned by the Rohm Music Foundation for a Festival in Kyoto 2005. I was asked by the festival to include “…Norwegian nature and Norwegian thinking…” in the piece; a task I found quite difficult. It was not until I read a book about evolution-theory that I was able to find a link between my piece and these two concepts.

Ciona Intestinalis is a small sea squirt living along the norwegian coast with a quite extraordinary life cycle. It starts out as a small larva swimming freely through the sea. It then finds a perfect spot where it wants to live, attaches itself to the bottom, eats its own brain, living the rest of its life as a plantlike, static creature. A beautiful metaphor of our life!

Ciona Intestinalis is seen as one of our very early forefathers, and one could argue that we still have some of this little creature’s evolutionary programing still within us. Both as individuals and as society, we are at the risk of eating our own brains.

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