AV

The idea behind the composition was inspired by the famous, extremely visionary work of the American composer Charles Ives (1874 - 1954) entitled "THE UNANSWERED QUESTION". It is a dialogue with the American artist and a musical attempt to search for answers to the questions stubbornly asked by the solo trumpet. As in Ives' case, the message of the work may have a broadly understood social and philosophical character. The solo trumpet - a lyrical subject - is intensely searching for answers to the existential questions, which we often ask ourselves in life, e.g. about the purpose and sense of our existence, the place of the individual in the world around us, interpersonal relations, as well as faith in love, our passions, but also fears, phobias that bother us.

In the presented chamber version, the work is divided into three 5-minute parts, each of which consists of two episodes: shorter, lasting one minute and longer, lasting four minutes. The whole is crowned with a 3-minute coda, which gives us, of course in the theoretical assumption, an 18-minute composition.

In the shortest, 1-minute episodes, accompaniment prepares, somewhat builds, the material that will appear in its full shape only in the final Coda. The solo trumpet at the same time chants, always three times, a persistent motif - a question that is a literal quote of the work by Ch. Ives.

In longer, 4-minute episodes, there is an attempt to search for musical answers to the questions asked by the trumpet. In the first part it has a quasi-baroque character, in the second part it is jazz, and in the third part it is a stylization of a mixture of Balkan and Jewish folklore. These three musical worlds are the spheres in which, so far, the trumpet has been given the opportunity to appear in its greatest splendor - the areas where the instrument has shown the greatest exploration, both by creators and outstanding performers. All three attempts to answer are based on the harmonic warp of the well-known jazz ballad "NATURE BOY", once popularized by the famous American vocalist Nat King Cole. Its text may be a suggestion of a verbal, semantic attempt to answer the questions asked by the trumpet. Each of the attempted answers, as it often happens in life, ends in doubt, disappearance, dispersion, understatement, loss of certainty in walking on, as it turns out, only seemingly certain ground.

The crowning part of the whole, the 3-minute CODA, refers to the famous "IL SILLIENZO", the hit of all trumpeters. It suggests the conclusion that we will most likely seek answers to the eternal, existential questions that bother us throughout our life, until its end that is symbolized by the motives of a funeral march chanted in the end of the composition.

Artur Banaszkiewicz