|
|
Moments Musicaux: musical figures that follow one another or sound simultaneously step out of the flow of musical events
and define unities, belong together. How is such unity constituted? What categories glue together the single sonic elements?
How long is a musical moment? How short can it be compressed, how long stretched – ten seconds, 60 seconds, five minutes?
How different can the events be, without losing their unity, how much do they have to differ, to be more than a repetition
of identities? Can „a tone“ become non-identical, can it become alienated to itself?
Momentsmusicaux
is chamber music. It happens in privacy (or pseudo-privacy). A few measures from Brahms Clarinet Quintet are one musical material
for the piece: synonym of and historic endpoint of a music that articulates “unity”. At the same time chamber
music defines a way of making music that cannot hide anything, since it is produced in so close, as if it would be under the
listener’s micros-cope. The instruments lay open, the material and the mechanics present themselves. A flute study by
Theobald Boehm, the grand “domesticator” of woodwind intonation, defines the other starting material for momentsmusicaux.
Starting material in a literal sense: to start from the strange object, which touches me, study it, confront its elements
with the other strange material and with itself; follow their internal syntactical and rhetorical possibilities to explore
the meanings of the material – find out, what it speaks or will be speaking to me about.
Hans Thomalla
July, 2004
|
|
|