For cello solo
Hexagram 56 is a suite of six ludi (short plays).
The emotional narrative follows the hexagram’s metaphorical structure.
Lü, The Wayfarer, is at first at the base of a mountain (“The valley”), in a huge valley and he feels disoriented. Subsequently (“Gradus ad Nihilum”) he begins climbing to the mountain top, where he can see the clouds beneath him (“The golden ecstasy of the empty). But a large fire burns there: the Wayfarer defies his limits coming into the fire like a Promethean act (“Mercury in the philosophers’egg”). He committed hubris that costs him a descent into the abyss (“Nigredo”). Through the chaos, the Wayfarer leads himself to a new lightness (“Mythology of trees”), a sense of liberation and reconciliation with nature that culminates in the meditation on leaves: he finds his wholeness contemplating the power of trees that have their roots in the ground but touch the sky with their leaves.
Simple sound ideas, suspended between xenharmonic drifts and tonal landings, shape an ambivalent emotional texture. Repetition and variation are the minimum compositional criteria. They produce sound compressions and rarefactions like an oscillation between the chaotic vitality that generates love and the tidy cosmos that perpetuates modular logical categories. The relationship between the performer and his instrument is manifested in vowels attempts that, however, remained unheard. The music begins when “of what one cannot speak, one must be silent”.