In the period I was blocked and without trusting in what I was composing, Unsuk Chin was my musical company. I heard Gougalön which inspired the beginning of the second movement. Also, her Piano Etude No. 2 (Sequenzen) from “12 Piano Etudes”, which I talked about it on the blog page titled “Ideas" from 16th November 2018, where I talked about transforming material from a slow gesture to a fast gesture.
But, it was not only music that stayed with me in the blocked moment. Bernardo Soares, a Portuguese poet - one of the many characters invented by Fernando Pessoa -, gave me some ideas to characterise both movements. So, for the first movement I selected: “Só o mar das outras terras é que é belo.” Which means “only the seas we cannot see are beautiful”; and for the second movement: “Aquele que nós vemos dá-nos sempre saudades daquele que não veremos nunca” which means "In watching the sea we see, we will miss the one we will never see.”
When I read this poem by Soares I thought that this idea, of something we see can be different from something we think but we cannot see, was appropriate for my work. Soares created a perspective of what he intended by looking to the see and another perspective of what he intended by thinking in the see. Is the same object with different views, different approaches; which is something I really wanted to do in "colours (closing in)”.