Matre: Nephilim Song

Description

Ørjan Matre's Nephilim Song for solo accordion takes as its inspiration a mysterious term that is mentioned twice in the Bible, one of them being in Genesis 6:4: "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown." It is not clearly explained what a Nephil is, but several theories exist. One of them is that the Nephilim were offspring of angels and humans, and an offence to God, provoking Him to flood the earth to remove all traces of them.

Nephilim Song uses two types of material, an ethereal, soft music in the extremely high register of the accordion, and a rougher, rhythmical material – angelic and humane, and the space between them. Nephilim Song was first performed by Frode Haltli at the Wittener Tage for neue Kammermusik on 29 April 2012.