A three-minute miniature for children’s choir, Counterpoints  takes its inspiration from Maciej Szańkowski’s sculpture Two  Stones A/B. The piece translates the sculpture’s formal logic into  musical terms: two elements, alike but not identical; tension  between weight and upward movement; symmetry thrown off  balance; and the significance of the space between the forms.

The choir becomes a living sculpture in sound. The children’s  voices divide into groups, their parts closely related yet never  exactly the same. Brief syllables, breaths, rests, and isolated  sounds pass from performer to performer in hocket: one group  begins, the other answers; one falls silent, the other takes up  the motion. Melody emerges between the voices.

Within the project’s context, Sculptures Sing the Wind, what  comes to the fore is the movement of sound through space: melody and rhythm leap between two points, sending the listener’s  ear along an ever-shifting path around the sculpture.

For Szańkowski, a central question was how sculpture might  cease to be a self-contained mass and become instead a field of relationships with the surrounding space. My composition puts  a similar question to music: how can a melody cease to be a line  and become a spatial installation emerging between voices as they  pass a sonic impulse from one to another?

Anna Jędrzejewska