Wanke, Otto: Aer

My composition aer was inspired by the work of the Italian Futurist painter Gerardo Dottori (1884–1977). Dottori’s oeuvre is dominated by landscape imagery, frequently conceived from an aerial, bird’s-eye perspective. His most significant contribution to Futurism was the development of aeropainting, a technique that sought to translate the experience of flight into a dynamic, spatially reconfigured vision of the landscape. The title aer directly refers to this concept of aeropainting and to the perception of space transformed by motion, altitude, and continuous flux. In the composition, I explore a musical analogue to Dottori’s mystically rippled landscapes: persistent figurations unfold like threads revolving in a constantly evolving spiral. This sense of rotational motion is further articulated through continuous tempo inflections and sharply contrasting dynamic changes, which together shape a fluid, airborne musical space.