I Fit All of Your Burdens Into a Marble

A marble is a fragile yet dense object — small enough to be held in the palm, yet capable of carrying immense weight. I Fit All of Your Burdens Into a Marble explores the idea of emotional and psychological burdens, encapsulating them within something seemingly insignificant but heavy with meaning. It reflects how memories, responsibilities and unspoken truths can be compressed into a single moment, a single question, or a single object.

The spoken text — “Do you know? Who was the one? Do you know what I did? Do you know how I did? No, no, no!” — evokes a restless search for answers, caught between confession and uncertainty. It suggests an internal reckoning, a lingering dialogue with the past that remains unresolved. The players speak it while striking the bodies of their instruments with their mouthpieces; elsewhere they sing, play mouthpiece only, breathe through the slide and slap-tongue, and the whole piece is played in harmon mutes. It begins with the bass trombone alone on stage; the other three enter one by one, as burdens do.

The music oscillates between tension and release, mirroring the act of holding on and letting go, creating a space where fragility and intensity coexist. It was written in 2021 for the Nordic Trombone Quartet, who premiered it at the Stockholm Brass Academy that August, and has since been played by Les Trombones de Bâle at the Female Classics Festival in Basel.