Aate I-IV for piano solo

«Aate I-IV» is a four-part 20 minutes work for solo piano and it is released on the recording «Vegom» in 2025 performed by the brilliant Julie Yuqing Ye

The piece was commissioned and mainly created during the period from 2006 to 2009, but it lay dormant until Julie Yuqing Ye took it up and contributed to the finished work. Ye and Rebne worked together on a new version during 2022 and 2023. Julie Ye is a highly skilled pianist, both musically and technically, and through the collaboration, the piece evolved into what it is today. Through the revision, the piece gained the delicate, hectic plasticity I often seek in my music. The piece was premiered in Gjøvik at the InnPUST festival in September 2023.

Aate I-IV is a poetic and virtuosic work with layers and lines that weave in and out of each other, where the material in the left and right hands alternates between individuality and coincidence. Part 1 serves as a source of musical gestures that are developed in Part 3, where Part 3 aims to make the entire piano resonate between intensity and tenderness. Part 2 receives its memory and tonal shadow in Part 4, which recalls Part 2 by filtering, adding, and compressing the material from Part 2. The piece is intended to function so that its parts are interwoven in the same way as the musical material is woven, mirrored, and held onto itself, thereby developing throughout the entire work. In the piece, poetic lingering and eruptive intensity are juxtaposed, and the idea is to show the beauty of the piece in various ways.

When I began writing the piece, I thought I wanted to write my “B minor sonata,” like Liszt’s beautiful B minor sonata. However, there are very few similarities. My aim has been the poetic and virtuosic in my treatment of the musical material, and that the entire register of the piano should be used to weave forth, in various ways, the beauty I seek in my music.