A butterfly leaves no traces behind. What’s more: from the larva, the organism transforms into another creature – and flies away.
Traces are footprints in the sands of history. Blurred by the tides of time into a tabula rasa: nothing remains.
Our culture, however, has turned the ephemeral into the permanent – at least temporarily. We call it “cultural heritage”.
These traces on paper, shellac, vinyl – and now as bits and bytes in storage media. Digital traces, virtual traces that we can no longer recognize without devices.
In principle, traces always lead back to past history. But in art? I maintain that the traces we follow in art come to us from the future!
It is however impossible for us to know the future. Quantum physics teaches us that there is no determinism. It may be that the flapping of the butterfly’s wings will lead to a tornado in the future – but this is only a possibility. We cannot know for sure. Every little particle, every detail in our lives, holds an unpredictable trace.
In “The Butterfly Equation”, the notation of my music, what the performers have to play and sing, leads into the future. But not everything in it is determined. The further we go – into the second act – the less is predetermined, the more possibilities arise for the performers to act spontaneously in the moment. Repeatability becomes increasingly impossible. The traces that lead into the future here become sporadic, become points of reference, jump from place to place until they elude our ability to follow them in the infinite horizon. Nothing is complete. New steps follow, leaving new traces. What counts is the memory of what has been said, what has been sung.
Thomas Cornelius Desi, Lucca, June 2024