Gaffky's

(1958)

Composer Gunnar Berg

Instrumentation Piano solo

Category Solo

Publication year 1970

Catalogue no. A.0170

Duration 90 minutes

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Gaffky's is one of Gunnar Berg’s two major works for solo piano - Eclatements (1954-88) is the other. They are both of a size that places them among the most voluminous manifestations in the Danish piano literature in the second half of the twentieth century.

In Gaffky's Berg, figuratively speaking, orientated himself towards the smallest elements of the universe, which can only be seen in microscopes: he now gazed into the microcosmos. Berg had begun the new work in 1958 in Berlin, and he showed some of the first sketches to a microbiologist, who compared the distribution of Berg's notes on the paper to pictures of different bacterial cultures, grown in petri dishes according to the methods developed by the German bacteriologist Georg Theodor August Gaffky (1850 – 1918) – methods that still apply today in the exploration of and fight against bacteria and viruses. On the manuscript paper, the individual notes and note groups appeared almost as points and colonies with different distances at play and with different degrees of density.

Gaffky's consists of 10 independent pieces, which Berg called assortiments, a French term that means both agreement and selection or extract from a whole. Each of the ten ‘assortments’ consists of ten small variants, each with its own special characteristics. Just as the bacteriologist plants a bacterium in a petri dish and lets it grow under different conditions, the composer lets a musical germ grow and unfold in 100 different ways.

Other Works by Gunnar Berg

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