About the creation

Wait till silence settles … a figure consisting of four tones gropes its was upwards, stops … hits with sforzato … rewinds into itself … more take offs and stops follow --- Hard motoric elements – later also elements of jazz – create contrasts, allow for the reappearance again and again of ametrical, "stagnating" figures. At the conclusion, the figure from the beginning is heard once more – now firm and encompassing a larger part of tonal space. The tones, notwithstanding the metrical contrasts, are uniformly performed in six pairs of notes, each consisting of two adjacent notes (in any octave) : E + E flat, F + F sharp etc. Mostly two of these pairs of notes form four-tone groups, of different inner tension. The piece consists of eight sections of which the last but one on page 9 will, to a large extent, be shaped by the performer. Fermatas was composed for the competitors for the Landolt Prize and was first performed in May 1978 at the Zurich Conservatory by the winner, Beata Wetly.