... die ihrem Wesen nach eine moderne, kraftvolle, dynamisch und registerartig angelegte Kadenz ...: MUSICA (Andrej Rijavec)

Milan Stibilj: ASSIMILATION
for violin solo

Among the composers of recent music, Milan Stibilj is without doubt the one who has most consistently, and thus also rationally, organized his works; right from the basis, they are already most strictly conceived, and this rigour is also built into the realisation of the composition.

In his work Assimilation, he prescribes a 4/8 measure, but only as it were to place it in brackets, i.e. as a means of aid for performance. The unusual and exceptionally powerful sound effect - by which we have in mind its inner power - is the outcome of liberated musical idea and its calculated, yet still spontaneous sound-flow, and is also characteristic of the full and complete conception of the "sensory re-experience" - as the composer himself has at one place noted of the work ...

... This is certainly a markworthy, and in our musical literature unique composition, a work which illuminates the composer's clearly defined principles, and at the same time his musical credo, which involves not only the finished form but also, within it, the full scope of Stibilj's mental and spiritual world.

Marijan Lipovsek:
Introductory note to the concert programme
Ljubljana 1989