Solitude of Sounds for tape (1975)

The most frequently repeated opinion about Solitude of Sounds is that it is one long sound lasting over twenty minutes. The more daring among the listeners regard the composition as an example of extreme minimalism, only one step from Cage’s 4’33’’ . Such slogans are as striking as they are far from the truth. It is a work of extraordinary richness of colours, an in-depth, 'maximalist' exploration of the structure of sound.

According to Barbara Okoń-Makowska, who had an opportunity to take part in a performance of the piece under the watchful eye of the composer himself, Sikorski paid a lot of attention to the right positioning of the sound equipment. Only a precise projection of sound and complete silence can create conditions in which it would be possible to hear the nuances teeming deep under the surface of a dense and muted sound mass.

Originally, the piece had a four-channel version and only by listening to it can we discover its author’s consistently pursued idea: the sound, swelling throughout the work, slowly moves around the listeners, it comes closer to them, corners them and, at the end, dies away into silence. A “flat”, two-channel version was made probably for the needs of the radio and, being the best known for technical reasons, it obviously lacks this particular effect. That is why when listening to the work, it is worth bearing in mind the spatial dimension of its original version.

As Tomasz Sikorski wrote in the Warsaw Autumn programme booklet,

Last October, as I was wondering about the shape of the work I was to make in the Columbia-Princeton studio, I spent a lot of time in my room listening to distant sounds coming through an open window.

It was a seemingly chaotic mixture of street noise, signals sounded by river boats and distant thunder of planes. After a while I had the impression that all these sounds were alive, perhaps even aware of their existence, as if wanting to speak. Getting together and yet doomed to loneliness, they made up a lonely chorus. I wanted to express this feeling in my new work. The loneliness of sounds has a storyline. In the initial part uniform sound material appears only in the lowest register, as if unable to 'get out’ of this area of darkness and uncertainty. Then in the upper register there appear sound complexes with a harmonic structure. They make up a kind of 'chorus' of harmonics, overlapping and 'oversinging' each other. However, the limitations of their nature prevent them from creating a new quality. They remain forever captured in their deficiency, circulating and existing.

I would like to note here that the above comments should be treated only as an expression of some reflection on the origins of the piece and in no way can they be regarded as an attempt to reveal any literal links between the inspiration provided by a specific sonic situation and the work itself. The situation was for me only an impulse to create a certain imaginary space filled with autonomous sound material governed by its own rules. In any case, my comments may have been prompted by a desire to explain my aversion to the music that clearly organised space, introducing into it an element of 'order'; this aversion resulted in the form of my work, where sounds only undulate, circulate, hesitate and sink into space.

Solitude of Sounds for tape was recorded at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre in October and November 1975. Its premiere took place on 13 March 1976 at the Florida State University in Tallahassee. In Poland the work was premiered in the same year at the Warsaw Autumn Festival. Duration of the work: 21’45”.