E é sempre melhor o impreciso que embala do que o certo que basta

Solo clarinet

✉️ If you wish to perform the piece, please contact me

Duration: ≈ 12’30”

Year: 2018

Premiered by Frederic Cardoso at Conservatório de Música de Paredes

Track in album “Mixed Dialogues” by the same clarinetist

Other performances: VII Festival Internacional de Clarinetistas at Rio de Janeiro by Batista Júnior (2019) and Espaço Lisboa Incomum by Frederic Cardoso (2018)

For this piece, I have created a catalog of eighth-tone scales that feature a muted timbre.

This work takes its title from a verse in a poem by Álvaro de Campos. In addition to evoking “Casa branca Nau preta” (White House Black Ship) in its character and content, where the numb poetic subject speaks of a liminal state, of indecision, of a pain of thinking that weighs him down, the verse carries with it, according to the composer, an aesthetic assertion. It is in the rhythm, the pitches, and the timbre that the composer attempts to imprint the imprecision musically. An imprecision “that rocks”: an illusion, a lullaby, the rocking motion, an impulse, a breath? It is always better than certainty because certainty dies in itself.