Manuela Kerer

Canto sferico

Spherical: What a wonderful word. 'Spherical, magical, shimmering, kaleidoscopic, spectral.' These were my associations. Only when researching this piece did I notice that 'sphere' derives from the Greek 'hull' or 'ball.' It was used in antiquity to designate the firmament, imagined as a hollow sphere. Pythagoras assumed that the movements of the spheres or heavenly bodies created tones with pitches depending on their distances and velocities.

Then I came across a text by Stefan Zweig, which, besides the idea of the firmament in constant motion, is perfectly consistent with Canto sferico (song of the spheres).

'Art knows no more beautiful moment than when it may show the excessive in its symmetry, in those spherically sounding seconds, when at the blink of an eye dissonance dissolves into primal blissful harmony: the more ghastly the rupture, so much the more powerful this collapse, so much the more effervescent the consonance of the plunging streams.'
(Manuela Kerer, 2017)