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ReBruAla The Great Vocal Trilogy »Three Songs« (2016) 1. lost future · Version for soprano and cello Composition commissioned by the Basel-Stadt and Baselland Music Committee lost future The recording is a studio production with members of the »Ensemble Polysono«, who also performed the piece on a European tour in 2017: Christine Simolka (soprano) and Simon Thompson (cello). lost future is a partly semantic poem by the composer, which was taken as a starting point for this composition. In the foreground of the music is the linear development of the singing voice, which is counterpointed by the cello in an independent way. With the necessary reduction and concentration on the essentials, a central tone and its inner life are explored. This follows structuring rules that meticulously balance the course and the tonal gravity. This piece is not a text setting in the traditional sense, but the exciting question of what happens when music that has already been composed meets an existing text.
The recording is a studio production with members of the »Ensemble Polysono«, who also performed the piece on a European tour in 2017: René Wohlhauser (baritone), Diana Muela Mora (bass flute) and Yolanda Fernandez (bass clarinet) . As in lost future I first composed a version for solo part alone for this work as well, before I let the two instruments develop their own world of sound independently of the singing part in a further step, which they then opposed to the solo part, whereby the already composed solo part had to react to it and itself partly changed again by this discussion. In the further course of the musical development, it was a question of breaking up the initial gesture in order to reach other areas of expression, other perspectives and ways of interpreting the text. The tension in the piece results largely from the back and forth struggle of the antagonistic forces, from the desire to free oneself from the strong suggestive pull of the poem. It was about gaining autonomy for the music, which, despite everything, should retain its cantabile expressiveness and not fall into a fashionable aesthetic of refusal. Quala Mirs The recording is a studio production with the »Ensemble Polysono«, which also performed the piece on a European tour in 2017: Christine Simolka (soprano), René Wohlhauser (baritone), Diana Muela Mora (bass flute), Yolanda Fernandez (bass clarinet) and Simon Thompson (cello). Just as opposites collide in our society, which over time turn out to be either integrable or conflicting, but still manageable or incompatible, so I often let opposites collide in my compositional work and then see what develops from it. In this sense, my music gains social relevance by reflecting and processing social conflicts with artistic means. In the present piece, this should also be done with the interval of the fifth, which is largely avoided in contemporary music because of its strong fundamental formation. In order to allow contradictory material to collide in the music, the medieval pure shifts in the sound of fifths that can be heard in the vocal parts at the beginning were immediately opposed by extremely noisy cluster-like elements in the instruments, which, in contrast to the fifths, radically neutralize any feeling for the fundamental tone. Through the consistent compositional work with the perfect fifths, the piece gradually developed such a high musical purity in the vocal parts that every hint of semantics seemed to me like a contamination. A text appropriate to the music was therefore invented. From this a kind of "musical Latin language" developed. Trio No. 1 The recording is a studio production with members of the »Ensemble Polysono«, who also performed the piece on a European tour in 2017: Diana Muela Mora (flute), Yolanda Fernandez (clarinet) and Simon Thompson (cello) . The appeal and challenge of composing this piece consisted in starting with an extremely limited tonal material, namely only one semitone step, and leading this material to very different, far-reaching processes through the most imaginative handling of the most diverse processing techniques. Analogous to the limitation of the tonal material, the rhythmic starting material should also be narrowly limited, namely to a sequence of continuous semiquavers. In a dialectic sense, this stringent setting of the initial disposition leads to great freedom of imagination in the design. From this, a completely unique process aesthetic develops. The result is the experience of an immanently organic passage of time. Tramador Kurianno The recording is a studio production with René Wohlhauser (piano). The challenge of starting with very few elements and gradually developing them was again a fascinating work for me in this piece. In this piece, it is a rhythmic-chordal nucleus that is processed and further developed, with the processing essentially consisting of varied and nested repetitions, splits, shortenings, expansions, compressions, stretches, increases and pauses in tension. This takes place in so-called development groups, which are often separated from each other by changes in time signature. The piece eludes a clear stylistic categorization. It walks a fine line between atonality, chromaticism, rhythm, jazz influence and new music. Marapro The recording is a studio production with Elia Seiffert (violin) and René Wohlhauser (piano). The starting material of this piece consists only of three evenly played tones of the chromatic scale. Is it possible to develop a whole piece from this minimal material, so to speak from almost nothing? And this in the extreme radicalism of reduction to the essential? These questions drove the compositional adventure of this piece. The radical nature of the reduction to the essentials is so extreme and uncompromising in this piece that this music probably belongs in the forbidden area for some purists of contemporary music (hence the subtitle). But music has to be extreme and radical, it has to go to the extreme if it wants to touch on the existential. Quamakúch Composition commissioned by the »art ensemble berlin«, with financial support from the SUISA Foundation for Music. The recording is a studio production with the »art ensemble berlin«, which also performed the piece on a European tour in 2017: Antonella Bini (flute), Oliver Potratz (double bass) and Art-Oliver Simon (piano ). A wild, chaotic beginning for all instruments is followed by an internalized duo of flute and double bass with a subtle exploration of microtones. In instruments with a so-called soft or flexible intonation (wind instruments and strings in contrast to keyboard instruments with inflexible intonation), microtones are often perceived more as sound colors than as clear pitch gradations. Therefore, in this piece for the flute and the double bass, I consciously tried to design the microtones with the help of microglissandi as intermediate areas between tonal colourations, gradations and sound gestures by, according to a grammar of the microtones, depending on the context, between the somewhat larger and more organic third tones (in the case of alternating notes) and the slightly smaller and less organic quarter tones (as an intermediate gradation in semitone transitions). (And if a microtonal movement takes place in one voice, the other voice stays on a sustained note so that the microtonal movement stands out clearly and is easily perceptible.) With this I achieve flexible handling of the microtonality in a contextual mixing of the different systems, and not what is usually practiced: the mere jump from a schematic application of the semitone system to an equally schematic application of the quarter-tone system. There follows a search for depth and substance and for structural richness. Border The recording is a studio production with René Wohlhauser (baritone and piano), who also performed the piece on a European tour in 2017. Wildness, unbridled will to express, directional power that pushes its way and tries to go beyond its limits, these are central, driving elements of this piece, which experiments with new forms of expression of immediate spontaneity and musical physicality. In the first part this is expressed through a sophisticated grammar of dense chord structures, while in the second part a kind of new, unleashed virtuosity breaks out. Due to its brevity and its density, the piece seems like a concentrated eruption. ReBruAla The recording is a studio production with the "Duo Simolka-Wohlhauser", who also performed the piece on a European tour in 2017: Christine Simolka (soprano) and René Wohlhauser (baritone, percussed piano and playback sounds). In ReBruAla the traditional distribution of roles is called into question, in which the limit of playability in the pianistic area marks the limit of the composer's expressive possibilities. The extremely dense piano that is in Border moves in the border area of the playable, becomes in ReBruAla lifted out of the traditional role allocation process of composing-practicing-performing and, as a playback sound, exceeds the limit of playability and thus also the limit of the composer's expressive possibilities. The concept of the piece is that the soprano-baritone duo has to find their way through the various structural layers that change like film cuts (six-part choir, wild piano, digital and analog noises) with the help of the beaten piano. The communication between the different layers is structured by their overlays, with the struck piano at the same time mediating and formally ordering between the contrasting layers. This procedure is an allegory of our current life situation, in which we have to move simultaneously in various complicated situations and subject areas, which we cannot fully understand in detail. Rene Wohlhauser program: Rene Wohlhauser (* 1954) ReBruAla The Great Vocal Trilogy »Three Songs« [01] 1 lost future (2016) 11:08 [02] 2 Disturbed Songs (2016) 10:34 [03] 3 Quala Mirs (2016) 11:08 [04] Trio No. 1 (2016) 13:44 [05] Tramador Kurianno (2017) 03:31 [06] Marapro . 07:28 [07] Quamakúch (2016-2017) 11:59 [08] Border (2017) 03:40 [09] ReBruAla (2017) 04:39 Total playing time: 77:57 first recordings
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