PROGRAMME NOTES
Iannis Xenakis: «Phlegra» (1975)
for eleven instruments / 13'
«Phlegra» is a one-movement, thirteen-minute composition for an ensemble of eleven instruments written for and premiered by the London Sinfonietta in 1975. Phlegra is the battlefield of Greek mythology where the battle of the Titans against the new gods of Olympus took place.
«As in other of my recent compositions, I have continued to construct textures and organize them on a higher level. I refer to textures in a general sense of form. For example, I first develop a melodic texture in the woodwinds; in parallel, a kind of aleatoric march emerges in the strings as a second element. A third is repeated notes that obey strict rhythmic rules, and so on. Textures in the sense of form are for me the cornerstone of art and science.» – Iannis Xenakis (translation: Matthias Arter)
Laure M. Hiendl: «»Seht meine Wunden und an meinen Beinen, die Narben meiner Wunden« (denn wir sind lange gewandert)» (2022)
for large ensemble / 60
World premiere*
«»Seht meine Wunden und an meinen Beinen, die Narben meiner Wunden« (denn wir sind lange gewandert» («»See my wounds and on my legs, the scars of my wounds" (for we have wandered long)») is a composition for large ensemble that explores musical forms of spatial thinking in a concert setting. This work deliberately does not follow the path of an installation with a distribution of musicians in the space. Instead, it aims to examine the potential of a traditional concert setting to make it possible to experience music as spatial art, which is first articulated as such through its musical formal language. It represents a concept of spatiality that is not primarily conceived in material terms: musical space is also and especially a metaphor for non-linear, de-dramatised figures of musical gesture in the broadest sense - for a soundscape that does not want to tell us anything. It is simply there. As spectators and listeners, we can only witness it.
The formal means with which a musical spatiality is to be created in the concert format stem from a way of thinking that is influenced by the techniques of digital composition and that wants to transfer these structures to instrumental-acoustic composition and instrumentation. Specifically, this involves the technique of sampling, which is applied to score excerpts instead of audio files. Four bars from Ralph Vaughan Williams' 5th Symphony (3rd movement) were chosen as ideal source material because of its harmonic simplicity. These four bars form all the material for the 60 minutes of music. By copying out small «grains» of notes from a small score sample window and assembling a new score in a long copy-paste process, a kind of musical freeze frame is created. Like a moving still life, we hear a very short score excerpt from a constantly slightly different perspective. The result is an oscillating sound image that corresponds in an instrumental-acoustic way to that of a phasing sampler.
The long title «»Seht meine Wunden und an meinen Beinen, die Narben meiner Wunden« (denn wir sind lange gewandert» is a quotation from Édouard Glissant's book «Philosophie der Weltbeziehung» (Wunderhorn, 2021, «Philosophie de la relation» Editions Gallimard, 2009). His philosophy is above all also a philosophy of landscape, which recognises its beauty in the differences and not in the unifying. This composition aims to do just that: to produce a musical soundscape through the repetition of the ever newly differentiated perspective, which we wander through in a long, almost ritualistic procession. – Laure M. Hiendl | 