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Ausruff
The music of my time –New Music just as Pop Music – is marked by a wholesale of semantic
clichés, of rhetoric stereotypes. They are triggered by composers just as effortlessly as they are consumed by an audience,
a semantic knee-jerk reaction of drums and trumpets, of shiny flageolet-chords, exotic jet-whistles, and fanfares of rising
clarinets. Composing "meaningful" music for me is to embark on an active quest for what precisely sounds and what
this sound exactly means, and not simply to settle for triggering elements from the repertoire of semantic clichés
like sounds from a sampler. It examines the roots of musical language rather then simply “speaking” in it, questioning
acoustic aspects of musical figures just as their aspects of accumulated history – layers of meaning that have been
deposited by centuries of rhetoric music.
“Ausruff” – Ausruf is German for outcry – for large
ensemble is an examination of the rhetoric figure of “Exclamatio”, of exclamation, in the musical language of
my times. At the same time it is the attempt of an exclamation by itself.
Hans Thomalla, October 2007
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