Biography

NOTE

"Speranze, che fate?" This piece is about a state of human being, circling around subtile forms of human dispair. It creates a tableau of a very personal orchestra language in which the sounds are not clearly to be related to their origin. Everything is in amalgamation. Everythings is in slow changes, streaming towards an infinite point of view which never will be reached.

In this piece voices are part of the "instrumentation". They behave like flutes or strings, like any other instrument which is part of the sound, just coming out for a short moment and disappearing again. Never being emphasized. Never being part of the  message. They just are colour, slightly, inconspicuous, unspectacular. The voices are disposed in 12 small groups in the space. They prolonge the orchestra, they give echoes, they connect things or produce an overhanging of sound in which the identity of vocal or instrumental colour is iridescent.

“I will leave, but you, my hope, what are you doing? Will you stay or leave as well?” It is not the text which is important here. It is the state of being which is communicated in a more surrounding way. Questions in-between. Very rare words, frozen into instrumental gestures, not to be understood word by word, in a surrounding of contradiction. “Speranze, che fate?”  In this piece I want to create the atmosphere of a strange, abstract desire. (…) Different sounds creating different layers moving on towards an imaginary point. Never real, always true.

(Text fragments from Francesco de Lemene (1634-1704), Partenza)

„Io parto, ma voi,            „I will leave, but you,
speranze, che fate?            hope, what will you do?
partite o restate?            will you leave or stay?
Se negate di partire            If you deny to leave
resterete col cor mio,            you will stay in my heart,
[…]                    […]
Solo voi consolerete            Only you will comfort me
[…]                    […]
se con me vi partirete            when you leave with me
e starete con me, […]    “        or stay with me, […]”
               
(Francesco de Lemene, Partenza, in: Poesie Italiane. Selected and translated by Margrit Richner and Umberto Giacchini, München: dtv 2006, S. 72-73. English translation by the composer.)
 

WORLD PREMIERE

WP: Neue Musik in St. Martin Kassel / Germany, 17. Juni / 24. Juni / 1. Juli 2012 (in three parts), Traudl Schmaderer, Sopran. Commission of St. Martin in Kassel / Germany for the Composer-in-Residence-Series accompanying the documenta XIII in Kassel 2012

NOTE

It was the aura of "vanity", of passing time, which led me into the piece, closely related to this small hand percussion instrument which sounds for me so vocal: the wahwah-tube. You just put the open tube in your hand, with the thumb whole on the upper side, and when you attack the metal with a small wooden mallet, you can modulate the way in which the sound is looping out. Faster or slower, regular or irregular, starting soon with the looping, or by and by. Once attacked, the sound diminuishes whatever you do. It produces "vanitas" in any way and it is always involved in the inevitability of the sound to die out.

You can only produce one single tone with this instrument, which cannot be hold on continuously, and which is extremely reduced in its range of dynamics. There is not much time to do the diminuendo. Life is measured. We do not have to say a lot untill it is diminuishing. I liked the idea to write a piece for voice in which this instrument, being played by the singer him-/herself, behaves like an inner shadow. The voice is giving the line, modulating the colour of words microscopiously, while the tube is subcircling a kind of inner echo, a shadow inside, an Alter Ego of what happens, which never is really congruent and which always remains under the surface.

The text of this cyclus is the text which bears the music. It roots in three short and very abstract fragments (lent by the New Testimony, but not being religious in a smaller range) which represent a secret themselves. They circle around the leaving, loss and vanity, around the ability to let things pass away. Gehen lassen. The text only appears after the piece in the score, as a kind of memory backward, giving a kind of imaginary view back. In the music the text is not really used in full words, but more subscribed, subcircled, by meaning. The different numbers of the piece give different ways to find a relationship between voice and tube (even through its absence) and to modify the sounds and colours of voice in its microscopic movements. They both create an atmosphere in which the diminuishing of things and life, the ability to let things pass away, remains as a open chiffre - never being pronounced. The pieces requests a high technical level of singing, not for reasons of virtuosity, but for the quality of vowels and colours and finest ways of melting things together and to produce irritations between instrument, voice and overtones.

Text (not used word by word, but freely "subcircled")

Nr. 1  “[dove] vai? […] [è bene per] voi […]” (Joh. 16, 5-7)
Nr. 2 [(…) “nicht, dass ich es schon ergriffen hätte (…)”] (Philipper 3,12)
Nr. 3 [„(…) lascia (…)”] (Lukas 9, 60)