The world premiere in Carrara of the ORT Foundation’s new commission: Ad Lucem. A sonic journey from an initial sense of tension towards a long-awaited, fragile and suspended light, to be performed again on Wednesday in Florence. A account by composer Matteo Rubini

I conceived Ad Lucem as the story of one of the many possible paths towards the light.

Not light in the sense of a sudden flash or a dazzling revelation, but as a hard-won tranquillity. It is a balance achieved through movement. It is a destination reached after a long journey. Also, it is a clarity that does not erase the shadow from which it springs, but restores meaning to it.

What appears constrained at the outset — the stridency of the tensions, the fixed rhythm — gradually unfolds.

The initial idea, entrusted to the strings in counterpoint, presents itself in a contained form. There is a progression that tends to wrap in on itself, as if the sound were unable to escape the enclosed space that imprisons it.

This situation is turned on its head by a twist of fate, a “joke of fate”, a burst of vitality that acts as a catalyst for change through the introduction of a more incisive and urgent rhythmic pulse. Afterward, the texture expands. The melodic lines broaden their contours. Then, the musical flow passes through moments of growing intensity until a climax that concentrates the energy into a vortex. Afterward comes a final ascent, a prelude to the final moment: the original idea reappears, recognisable in its charge of tension, yet transfigured. The movement subsides. Everything dissolves into a renewed equilibrium. Silence takes hold, and finally a faint invocation of light emerges: a few notes, played by the first and second horns.

The dawn responds to the invocation, the gradual emergence of daylight on the horizon. It is a light that cannot yet be seen, but which is awaited with hope.

The piece concludes in this luminous, still incomplete suspension: the fragile and promising moment that precedes the rising of the sun.