Sonus Lumine

Sonus Lumine conveys an opposition between dissonance and consonance. Lumine represents the light that is hidden inside every chord, which is especially apparent in consonant chords (from a historically informed perspective), particularly when these chords appear in a dissonant context (e.g., bar 119).

Sonus Lumine is a pilgrimage along a path of atonal shadow and dream, leading to consonance bursting with light, disarming in its simplicity, a tonal response to unanswered questions in a dissonant realm. The analysis of those dreams, based on André Breton’s text “Les vases communicants’’ (1932), reveals repressed thoughts or images — referring to different dissonant contexts throughout the piece — which find a disguised realization in other dreams, i.e., consonant chords. A cortège of agitati figures culminating in a heavily sostenuto aria, artistically embroidered by these same figures (e.g., bar 74), finds its source in the same idea, generating horizontal aspects of the dreams to mutually complement the vertical reality created by the chords. It is a metapsychology of meaning, i.e., a projection of parts of the self used in other dreams, which holds the continuum together in a distinct intelligibility.