Video
"a fuoco lento ("on a low flame") was created for a concert in the context of haute cuisine. During the sometimes exhilarating search for musical references to the art of cooking, I came across a cookery book called nimm 3 ("take 3"). "The most important thing is that the three main characters in your dishes harmonise really well. However, they must not be too similar to each other to be a good match, as everyone probably knows from their own relationships. [...] Turn a normal ingredient relationship into a triangular relationship: chicken and rocket is fine, but it only gets really exciting with lemon."
Limiting myself to a few characteristic elements - I was inspired to start with a few skeletally exposed events or situations. With the simmering (a fuoco lento), things gradually start to move. They change colour and consistency, unfold scents, enter into connections, merge." (Karin Haußmann)
Or would you rather just dance? Well, don't let me stop you.
In her work, Kristine Tjøgersen captures the highly choreographed energy of the Bollywood dance number Jaan Pehechaan Ho from the film Gumnaam, 1965. The masked man in the video is the famous dancer and choreographer Herman Benjamin, also known as "Mr Charisma". Benjamin was influenced by American rock'n'roll dance such as Lindy Hop and Jitterbug and mixed it with more traditional Indian dance routines. In the piece, Tjøgersen translates the dancers' movements into musical gestures that emphasise their unique styles and movements. Things that are often overlooked are highlighted through the dialogue between music and film. In this way, she wants to continue mixing different styles in search of new forms of expression.
Cyanotype is a photographic printing process in which blue tones are produced on the negative from ferrocyanide (a compound of hydrocyanic acid salts and iron). The so-called "Berlin blue", which conquered the (art) world 300 years ago, is a well-known example of this.
In a way, composing is also a process of printing - in Soto Mayorga's work the "imprint" of the sonnet wreath "Das Schmetterlingstal. A Requiem" by the Danish poet Inger Christensen. The composer works here with metaphors from lines of sonnets such as "Is it the dreamed summer hour of my childhood, fragmented as in time-shifted flashes?" and by transferring series of numbers from the verses, syllables and letters to different pulses and time signatures of the piece.
Soto Mayorga's interest is in this "coloured dust", as Christensen calls her butterflies, and the poisonous cyanide oxide of the cyanotype, from which, in his words, he tries to "cut a scar of colour and light out of the skin of memory. But its light does not shine and its colour is colourless. It is a memory that remembers itself. A sleeping river that dreams of its flow." "I can hear that you call me nobody," writes Inger Christensen, and in this anonymity the composer is called upon to imagine himself "as a blue butterfly, harlequin, bucket butterfly or imperial cloak". (Wolfgang Rüdiger)
encuentros casuales ("chance meetings")
At some point in a life, a chance meeting happens with some point in another life; a chord happens that is completely right. Where do these lines/lives come from? Where do they go? How would they possibly - in independence - sound together before and after these meeting points? What then was coincidence: the meeting itself or what happens before and after?
This piece is also a tribute to Eric Dolphy and is strongly influenced by the farewell song So Long, Eric, which his friend Charles Mingus composed when Dolphy stayed in Europe after a joint tour. (Vladimir Guicheff Bogacz)
wide - further - furthest? - further or closer? - or further ahead? The eponymous word can have several meanings depending on the context. Whatever the case, it is above all the state of unsteadiness, the fleeting, the there-where-you-are-not-willing-to-be that characterises this composition and to which the 11 musicians are exposed. (Ralf Hoyer)
I approached the piece through the idea of how thoughts flow through different emotional and mental states that involve a refinement of thought and behaviour patterns and intensities. An apt comparison would be the situation of paralysed movement in sleep, where one tries to scream in a dream but realises just before waking up that, despite feeling intense, one has only made very faint sounds or none at all.
The piece has a hazy, shaky and sometimes brittle tonal language in places. As much as it reflects my own struggles, it also intends to speak of shared fear, mistrust and voiceless cries of people who have no means or power to be heard. (Feliz Anne Reyes Macahis)
De Profundis - From the depths I call to you, Lord (Psalm 130). From the deepest notes of bassoon and bass clarinet, music rises upwards, wants to leave the dungeon of darkness and soar into the light, shatters in the bassoon's rugged multiphonics, echoes in the bass clarinet's delicate duple tones, is attacked by the relentless rhythms of the bass drum. The instruments cry out, lament, doubtfully seek their way - together/against each other - and sing a song of longing and hope. (Wolfgang Motz)
Commentary by the composer:
"It all started with the idea of wellness. But the music on these CDs was so bad that it was impossible for me to use it anywhere. This led to the idea of a concerto in the sense of Praetorius' later definition of arguing and contrasting. I will never write a solo concerto in my life, but a concerto with naturally modulated solos appealed to me. Nono's well-known fermatas were conceived as openings for the unheard, e.g. "colouri"! However, they are conceived without contradiction. For me, the solos play the role of fragments of their own kind, namely with their inherent paradoxes. The "Doppelgänger" (Heine/Schubert) is also a paradox. And when Heidi Klum meets the "Doppelgänger" in the "concert", the paradox itself becomes a paradox. Dialectical contradiction as paradox encourages us to ponder. We have long experienced nature as beauty on holiday, as a provider of catastrophes. Tsunamis, disasters, explosions are reified into mere media excitement, our history evaporates into media waiting for events. Such sensory telescopes, so to speak, in an incessant state of waiting, reduce our senses to a kind of situationism. Soap operas and series are orientated towards events, playing with calculated paradoxes. After all, elenovelas supposedly have a "magic moment" to which they owe a certain closure despite their infinity as a series. Towards the end of the "concert" there are 7 dramolettes. The Internet can also be used as a source of preparation.
Classical physics represents the everyday experience of our senses. Marx thought a lot about the simplifications and riches of our senses due to their possibility of exchange with society. But that was already too complicated for our practical lives! Quantum physics as an object of ideology-free (! / ?) natural research can modulate something additional onto the solos, namely, for example, non-locality or that the present (the musical moment) is a mixture of all conceivable pasts that are compatible with what we hear now. The illusion of a possible probability image of the past for us listeners supports a double bracket system of bringing back the past as if it had not even existed. The envisaged possibility of using an audio beamer that works with pinpoint accuracy not only isolates the listener in sections and in a flash, but with its past-scanner content is a "doppelganger of a special kind: Heidi Klum doesn't meet him, he meets you, dear listener!"
Nicolaus A. Huber (2008)
In Kataklothes, Eres Holz explores the interplay between harmony and melody. The ancient Greek word means "spinners" and appears in Homer's Odyssey as the name for the three moirs or goddesses of fate who weave the thread of life for mankind. The image is appropriate for the composition, in which Holz creates a chain of harmonious sequences as a continuous thread. As soon as the harmonic sequences of the flowing vocal progression have become established, shifts set in and the progression becomes rhythmically more complex, playful and lively.
After the first third, the harmonic development stops and the melody gains the upper hand with complex figurations, a dense texture and virtuoso lines. When the chordal chaining of the beginning returns, the movement seems fresh again, only to be changed once more. "At the end, the action dematerialises until the final cut" (Eres Holz). The thread of fate is audibly cut off. (Eckhard Weber)
