for flute (doubling piccolo), oboe, two clarinets (2nd doubling bass clarinet), bassoon (doubling contraforte), french horn, trumpet, trombone, piano, keyboard, percussion (two players), two violins, viola, two cellos, double bass (all amplified), four live speakers, audio playback and live electronics (2016/17)

28 minutes

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Awarded the 63rd Composition Prize of the Federal State Capital of Stuttgart 2018

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performances:

November 27, 2017, cresc… biennale für aktuelle Musik, HR-Sendesaal Frankfurt am Main, Ensemble Modern (Enno Poppe, conductor)

February 6, 2019, ECLAT Festival, Theaterhaus Stuttgart, Klangforum Wien (Bas Wiegers, conductor), Mathis Bossert, Simon Kluth, Sarah Palarczyk, Jonathan Peller (live speakers)

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Work commentary, 2017:

Based on impulses from theater studies, I have begun in recent years to understand the concert hall itself as a space of experience and memory that can be constituted and differentiated in the composed interweaving of instrumental, vocal, and electronic sounds – which in turn are constituted in specific musical parameters (timbre, harmony, rhythm, etc.) and contrasts (static/movement, strong/weak playing energy, stable/labile sonority, soloist/group, etc.), concrete sound material (field recordings, “soundscapes”), and spoken or sung text can be filled out by “imaginative backdrops” in which each individual listener can find themself individually by contextualizing and supplementing what they hear with their own memories and experiences. In this respect, I increasingly think of many of my com-positions as “listening theater”. Although the concretely hermeneutically “readable” material in this piece is intentionally very limited to a few textual contexts and field recordings that I made in Beijing and Istanbul, the compositional challenge of weaving this into a complex ensemble structure is all the stronger, in which the conflict between a supporting function for the narrative components and an aesthetic uncompromisingness is reflected in the germ-cell-like development of a musical structure that stands for itself, that can be heard quasi “absolutely” and in its abstract-formal structure (among other things as a passacaglia-like “Sinfonia concertante” with soloistic functions of the double bass and the two pianos) follows its own musical laws, initiates processes, drives developments forward.