DW29 – Loops for Paweł Szymański
- Bernhard Lang

The work originated from an idea suggested by Mirko Jevtović, who approached me with the concept of writing a piece for two accordions.

I thought about this, but since my schedule was full, I decided to explore the idea later. However, at Christmas 2016, at my house in Carinthia, I suddenly had a vision for the whole work and wrote it down quickly. 

I have had a close relationship with the accordion since my youth, as both my father and my mother played the instrument, the latter to a virtuoso level. In the 1990s I met Krassimir Sterev, for whom I wrote Schrift 3 in 1997. Since then the accordion has appeared regularly in my pieces, for example in DW3, Monadology XII andXXI, or in the music theatre pieces Montezuma and ParZeFool.

There have been two additional influences, one of them being the work of Paweł Szymański, whom I consider to be one of the most important contemporary composers and who has influenced my work since the 1980s. 

The other is Sevdah music, with the finale of DW29 consisting in a transcription of an original Sevdah piece. e technique used here, as in most of my works, is based on differentiated loops of all kinds, reaching different plateaus of energy, here ending in a dark, melancholic metaloop melody. 

Bernhard Lang