Born in 1963 in Schlüchtern, in Hesse, Isabel Mundry grew up in Berlin where she began studying composition at the Hochschule der Künste, in the classes of Frank-Michael Beyer and Gösta Neuwirth. She also follows the course of electronic music at the studio Technische Universität Berlin as well as musicology materials, art history and philosophy (1983-1991).

Between 1991 and 1994, Isabel Mundry followed further studies with Hans Zender in Frankfurt, lived in Paris as a grant winner at the City of Arts and at IRCAM as part of a yearly computer and composition training. Since 1996 she is professor of composition at the Musikhochschule in Frankfurt; since 1997, lecturer in the Akiyoshidai Festival (Japan) and since 1998, lecturer of composition in the summer courses in Darmstadt.

Isabel Mundry has won numerous prizes and grants: among others, the composition grant of the Berliner Senat, the Composition Prize of the city of Berlin, Boris Blacher Prize, the "Kranichsteiner Musikpreis" ...

The composer's works give a prominent place to the concepts of time and space. She has mainly focused on the temporal aspects that extend in its creation, "the polyphony of Dufay up to the idea of free time developed by Cage, passing through the temporal flow of Debussy. To this are of course added the extra-musical impulses, especially in areas such as cinema, figurative arts and literature".

Isabel Mundry attributed to art the ability to give shape to abstract knowledge. In her works, this is done especially in the form of polyphonic structures, such as her orchestral piece Le Silence - Tystnaden (1993) which opposes three different sound styles: sharply increased pulse, melodic forms and sound plans. Very rigid at first, the borders fade out and the different types begin to look alike. But the result of this imaginary debate is still not known. Mundry wished to highlight the experience of the lack of resolution.

In her string quartet, No one (aucun, 1994/1995) she is working on the idea of possibility / impossibility of uniting contraries by developing completely different pulsions and thus creating "a Babylonian confusion of language". At no time in this quartet, the measure is set uniformly, and thus is born a "polyphony of different lengths".

In Spiege Bilderl (Mirror Image, 1996), for clarinet and accordion, Isabel Mundry engaged in experiments on the phenomenon of reflection. In this music, each "mirror" reflects a new "image" to allowing the most diverse ambivalence while multiplying the perspectives.

Since 1998, Isabel Mundry works particularly on the spatial aspect of music: Flugsand (1998) for orchestra, Geträumte Räume (1999) for 4 trumpets, Traces des moments (2000) for clarinet, accordion and string trio, Ferne Nähe (2001), a work for quartet spatial strings and orchestra divided into five groups, Gefalteter Augenblick (2002), a work for orchestra.

In these works, space is not a stable element, constant. It is continually recreated through the staging of polyphonic lines but also by the different degrees of presence of the instruments.

With Ein Atemzug - die Odyssee (2005), which includes 2 pieces for orchestra that the composer had written in 2003 - Gefaltete Zeit and Penelopes Atem - Isabel Mundry expands her work on the spatialization of music in musical theater or opera (Musiktheater).

NOTICE

Nocturno, a piece for orchestra, was created February 16, 2006 in Chicago by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Daniel Barenboim.

"As the concertos for Mozart, the spicy but atmospheric of "Nocturno" of Mundry requires relatively little strength. The orchestra has been widely divided on stage, with a group of seven solo instruments including a piano placed at the far right of stage of Barenboim. The musicians who are grouped in two small ensembles, are grouped to the left well behind the stage.

"Nocturno" explores the relationship silence / sound, but Barenboim has built a long-periodic 'accoustical' gesture. The strings range from "a tense barking" and a nauseous sound; and the percussion between crying and a smooth murmuring. The energy builds up and decreases, but a strange feeling of expectation fills the air."

(translation made from an article by Wynne Delacoma in the Chicago Sun-Times)

Duration: approximately 14 minutes

WORLD PREMIERE
2/22/2013: Premiere (Order from Musica Viva of Bayerischer Rundfunk), piano: Nicolas Hodges

NOTES
I do not have any trouble finding words to speak about some of my compositions. At the origin of those there are reflections, which can be described by the language, even if in the second time the music is withdrawn again from the language.

For Non-Places, a concerto for piano, the words remain distant from me, even if some of them are pronounced inside the music. If I were to describe the nature of this part, I would prefer to concentrate on the process of its creation. The origin of Non-Places is to be sought in the concerto for piano “Moi et toi” that I composed in 2008. In this new version, it is not a question of widening and of revising what exists already, but of giving a second prospect for this theme. It is thus about a second piece, which leaves all its value to the first, because he is located elsewhere. For that, I took again some passages of the first work, left side the majority of them and rewritten as a whole piece. In the preceding piece, I had placed the double concept me and you as a thinking figure of all the decisions referring to the composition. In this case I did not want that the piano and the orchestra to represent the opposition of the individual and the mass, but on the contrary to symbolize two prospects having echo and which report can be driven in a moving spectrum from attraction to repulsion, from tenderness to violence.

And it was important to me also to understand how the two sides, the “Me” and the “You”, could respectively act as a principle in each one of them. And this is the starting point of the new composition. It is less about the evolutionary glance focused on a contrast, than about the clean evolution of the being which implies obviously a modified glance on the rest. I want to speak about the changing identity. That could seem abstracted at the first time, but thanks to the music it can be described in a very concrete way.

She questions herself, begins with daily commons noises such as a cracking, a conversation, a laughter, a pinking or digital sounds. Slowly these sounds are built-in musical contours. That could enter a before/after process, from not-music to music. However these sounds will resound again later, not as if they had been stored, but like coming from the music. They are the same sounds, but they became of different nature, like other elements of the composition besides. In the same way, the harmony moves, lets the tonality appear then disappear, not like a quote or a melancholic historical place, but like a possibility, among others, in the way the sounds can be born and disappear. I would compare here the piano more to a wire, which by all these modifications is tightened, but also colours itself. Non-places - this concept comes from sociology and indicates places, almost immaterial, because they do not constitute identity. They are transitional places, like the halls of airport, the chains of hotels and the commercial arcades. The oeuvre plays occasionally with these associations. One could think that in such places the Being disappears. However one can also describe them like blank, in which the Being becomes again possible and can evolve. At the beginning of the composition one hears a diffuse conversation, then arrives a spoken text, in fact some passages of the lyric work of Oswald Egger. They end in the words “Nothing, that is”. One could give a melancholic sense to these words. For me they are synonymous with beauty.

Isabel Mundry (2012)