With her new orchestral piece, Ľubica Čekovská recalls the playful consciousness of our childhood. The first performance takes place in Houston at the end of November.

The Slovak composer’s new work grew out of many years’ artistic and personal dialogue with her fellow countryman Juraj Valčuha, the conductor and music director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra. An extensive back-story lies behind the first performance with the top American orchestra stretching back to their respective time as students when they developed a shared sensitivity for sound, structure and expressive depth. For Ľubica Čekovská there are two premieres at the same time – that of her new work, coupled with her first trip to the United States. “The invitation to compose for such an ensemble, under the baton of a conductor with whom I share a deep musical affinity, made the creative process both liberating and extremely productive in the best sense”, says the composer about the collaboration.

“Toy Procession” is the title of the resulting work, which seems playful at first glance – but in this playfulness lies a profound philosophical approach. Čekovská is concerned with the process of remembering, of reviving childhood imagination, that carefree simplicity we often leave behind us when we are grown up: where do the dreams of childhood disappear to? Does adulthood mean that you forget how to play, or does the way in which we play simply change? The composer summarises the idea of her work aptly: “In this music I am not searching for nostalgia, but rather recognition. The toy becomes a symbol – not only as an object, but as an emblem of the purity of perception, of astonishment, of the ability to see the world anew. This ability to be amazed – full of joy, with wide-open eyes in the here and now – is something which children have, and which we must learn again. Through sound, I attempt to find access to this original view, to that gentle clarity of being.”

Musically, this is expressed in several rhythmic motifs, which have their own melodic DNA and rhetoric. In the course of the piece, the motifs unfold like a burgeoning consciousness – from standstill to movement, from stillness to structure. “These motifs gradually awaken and lead into a playful, but internally coherent series; they do this in an almost ceremonial way. Finally, the musical figures culminate in a frenetic procession, a wild dance which staggers on the verge of chaos, until the energy dissipates and everything returns to peace. The structure is designed less for development in the classical sense, but more for emergence – a parade of musical archetypes which are briefly portrayed and then drawn back into the subconscious. It is music as movement, not as the moment.” The piece is written as a through-composed arch, as a “ten-minute-long stream of orchestral life”, in which forms develop, textures collide, tonal colours dissolve and rhythm becomes the structural principle. At the end the sound dies away, as if it retreats into a place beyond the audible.

Tessa Singer
(from [t]akte 2/2025)
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson)