MEDIA

Nenia for flute (bass flute), violin, cello and piano

comissioned by NOW! Festival Essen

The starting point for the composition was the desire to formulate an aesthetic of “shimmering through”, in which a source material is only indirectly perceptible in the result. This shimmering through resembles the shimmering through of messages, everyday experiences, wishes and fears through one’s own personality. The basis for this piece are the transcriptions of the choruses of Viyan Peyman – Kobane and Slime – Bullenschweine. Both transcriptions were translated into code in order to generate a particell with the help of Markov chains. Both the classic stochastic system and a loop system were used. For the pitch distribution, I used spectral analyses from both examples and partially superimposed them. The subsequent replacement of all pitches of the Markov output by the spectral chords led to a further separation from the source material. From a large number of variants generated in this way, I selected a particell for manual instrumentation and elaboration.

The piece was created in close collaboration with Mariana Hernández. Through this close collaboration I was able to gain deep insights into the possibilities of double harmonics and scordatura. The piece consists of three parts, a kind of minimalist chorale at the beginning, an elegy of expressionist remnants in the middle and a rhythmically motivated conclusion. For the third section, I algorithmically generated a tape from 23 individual sound corpora that I shaped by hand.

An investigation of microtonal tuning systems