When Maya Verlaak receives the commission for a new orchestral work, she immediately knows where to begin: not with a key or a form, but with the performers themselves. Together with cellist Jasmijn Lootens and violinist Sarah Saviet, she explores techniques that form the basis of the concerto. More specifically, they investigate how to produce harmonics using only the bow, without fingering the strings. Technically, this is extremely demanding – and unpredictable: there is never any guarantee the harmonics will actually appear, Maya explains.

“The acoustics become part of the process. You can rehearse as much as you like, but the result always remains uncertain. That is exactly what interests me: I am a composer of chance.”

Although Maya has written for orchestra before, this is her first concerto. One of the biggest challenges lay in the score itself: how do you notate music that emerges through chance? To tackle this, she developed her own software, capable of analysing recordings of the soloists and translating them into two reservoirs of notes: one for cello, one for violin. Together, these databases contain more than two thousand short fragments, which become the building blocks of the orchestral material.

The fragments appear throughout the score like miniatures, gradually forming a layered, sometimes noise-like sonic landscape. “It is as though you are layering two concertos on top of one another,” she explains.

The title Sci-Volo-Palla refers to the Italian words scivolo (slide), volo (flight), and palla (ball) – and, in a way, to Maya’s own Italian roots as well. Movement lies at the heart of the work: this is a concerto built on action and reaction. The soloists set everything in motion, throwing musical material towards the orchestra, which responds and reflects it back.

Alongside this, Maya incorporates live electronics. Microphones capture the music and send it to a program where it is processed and transformed in real time, before being projected back into the orchestra. The result is a continuous feedback loop between soloists, orchestra, and technology.