The task I set myself for Reading Malevich was to transform an image, an optical event, into music. I selected the painting Suprematismus No. 56 by Kazimir Malevich as my starting point. Malevich uses the term suprematism to describe his purely abstract series of paintings, which began with his radical work Black Square (1915).

My work is in two parts: Horizontal and Vertical. This is a reference to the observer’s line of sight and reading direction. Within these two principal parts, individual sections refer to recognisable forms in Malevich’s painting: The Brown Rectangle, The Pale Yellow Shadow Before The Red Rectangle, etc. In certain passages, these forms represented by the orchestral tutti are inscribed with corresponding details from the painting. Peter Eötvös