Over the past few years I have become increasingly interested in both the haiku literary form and the Japanese aesthetics of ma, a highly focused Japanese awareness of silence as a crucial musical event occurring between two sounds. The application of the haiku employed in still consists of 17 verses, each divided in 17 musical syllables (5+7+5). By so doing, I created a meta-haiku consisting of recurrent and interrelated segments. In still I have also explored microtonal differentiations in relation to different tunings of the guitar and the viola reinforced by the timbral flexibility of the bass flute. Additionally, I have conceived each of the three instruments as a complementary sonority of one meta-instrument.

still was commissioned by and written for Das Neue Kammertrio, and premiered by them at the Guitar Festival in Bad Bru?ckenau, Germany, on 19th September 2001.