Auf Distanz
for bass flute and small ensemble (2020)
To be at a distance to the environment on everyone's lips was social distancing. This newly cultivated distance between people, the extended, physical space of each individual, did not have a purely negative influence upon me. Alongside protecting us all it enabled me, from time to time, to breathe better to think more freely and, in a subtle manner, be respectful towards people I did not know. But the effects on the whole practice of music were serious: the concertante realization of music entirely put on hold, the veritable core of what it is all about - mimesis - remained in force only virtually.
I concentrate on the leaves in front of me. Interestingly, mimesis (in the sense of Aristotle's poetics), usually a virtual component in composing anyway, occupies me all the more intensely right now. What is available to me for live experimentation is me, my voice in terms of sound material. Immediately. In the feedback loop of myself, I try to fictitiously double my mouth at the impossibility, and to think of it once as a sound source in the immediate vicinity, now as a massively enlarged resonance body on an imaginary stage in front of me: in space. It is the devotion and necessity for immediate musical creation in itself that urged me to search for a translation of this fictive sound situation into the instrumental. The result has been five sketches for bass flute and a small ensemble.
I. schnalzen (to chirrup)
II. kichern (to giggle)
III. schreien (to scream)
IV. lauschen und singen (to listen and to sing)
V. atmen (to breathe)
23 August 2020, WP, Lucerne Festival, KKL Lucerne, Switzerland
Matteo Cesari, bass flute; Baldur Brönnimann, conductor; Ensemble of the Lucerne Festival Alumni; SRF 2, recording
6 November 2022, Concert Hall 3 ZHdK, Zurich, Switzerland
Hector Rodriguez, bass flute; Johannes Kalitzke, conductor; Ensemble Arc-en-Ciel
