One of the few composers to successfully cultivate an avant-garde style from the 1950s onward, the Siberian Edison Denisov was trained as a mathematician as well as a musician, and once stated that he learned more from painters than from composers. It is not surprising that his work often proceeds by piling many polyphonic lines upon each other in a tone-texture of great complexity. The effect of this ten-minute work is of adding one brushstroke after another, as its initial single-line texture is added to by more and more lines, until it becomes quite dense, active, and complex. As is often the case with this composer it is the texture and density of the musical events which is most important, without particularly noticeable melodic events. It is not a work which endears itself to an average experienced symphonic audience. It was premiered in Germany in 1970 by conductor Ernest Bour.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide