EUtopia by Brussels Philharmonic

EUtopia - For symphonic orchestra

"Europe: from ideal to utopia? That's pretty much the arch EUTOPIA casts. Conceived in one movement, it begins brightly and hopefully – like the European Idea – with harmonic, natural, high orchestral spectra. There is also a nod to dodecaphony, the twelve-tone system that underpinned the serialism that symbolised renewal just after World War II: Europe was the project of renewal to ensure that we could live in peace and freedom.

But when I began writing the work in the summer of 2023, deals were being made to keep people outside our European borders, in ways I felt were no longer consistent with European values. This has had repercussions in the music: after the carefree beginning, distortion and noises enter the pure sounds. The tension rises, the texture becomes denser, and finally the sound mass culminates in the strokes of a bell. These quote Beethoven's Alle Menschen werden Brüder, like a kind of broad cantus firmus in a long, slowing time-stretch. Firstly, the original is heard, then repeated in the minor. Perhaps it carries somewhere within it a (forlorn) hope: Europe was not quite utopic after all, but the music continues the message of An die Freude."

— Annelies Van Parys 2024