[10.10.2012] After her extensive composer portrait at St. Martin’s, Kassel, at which 27 works were performed, Charlotte Seither’s new projects all place a characteristic spectral sonority at their centre.

Fünf Stücke um den Fluss zu queren

For the composer, her being present in Kassel, the home of the Documenta exhibition, was an intense artistic experience, culminating in the final concert with the premiere of her Fünf Stücke um den Fluss zu queren (Five pieces to cross the river, performed by the school orchestra of the Wilhelmsgymnasium. The work requires two levels of musical competence. At the upper musical level, a conventionally-notated score requires trained interpreters who can perform a fully-developed music text. In addition to this, there is a group of ‘sound effect makers’, producing more basic sounds. The ‘sound effect making’ can also be undertaken by untrained players. As well as performance by a youth orchestra, as in Kassel, where the instrumentalists played the alternating sound effect parts, Charlotte Seither says that “this piece can also be performed by a professional orchestra which invites a school class to play the sound effect parts. I think it’s important to forge links between a professional symphony orchestra and integrated sound groups which can also be played by untrained children and young people. It offers the opportunity of performing a piece together, without compromising on artistic demands.” Five short, richly coloured tableaux bring trenchant orchestral portraits to life, in which the instrumental groups can be flexibly scored.


Guarda in giù

The title Guarda in giù, translated as “look down”, contains an ambiguous invitation: a musical movement, which is fundamentally steered from a low bass line, allows a tissue of sound to be created over a repeated low note. In an irregular metre, this bass note transports the pulsating vibration into the resonance of the space over which the higher parts add spectral sound effects or pitch gestures. “In this work I wanted to create a sound space starting from a soft, flowing pulse, but in an unpredictable metre. I grasp each choral piece as an exercise in “inventing” the instrument of the chorus anew, that is to find a new way of allowing the instrument of the chorus to think afresh. In Guarda in giù I decided to lead the piece from the bass part. In the process, I use a fictitious instrumental language as the impulse for the sound, which distantly recalls old Italian.” Acoustically, this bass note creates, as it were, a pulsating continuous note which sets events in motion in the other parts, and pursues a choral sound ideal of producing vibrating space and emphasizing each voice in its sound idiom, and allocating each its own function. The “glance downwards” therefore has a compositional meaning, but is also intended as introspection of the voices into the depths. The bass note in its unpredictability becomes the fundamental for a spectral edifice of pulsating events in the space. The composition therefore continues Charlotte Seither’s instrumental work, from Recherche sur le fond for orchestra and Beschriftung der Tiefe von innen for ensemble, in which she conceives the instrumental writing starting out from a linear-shaped depth.


Schwebende Verse: Floating verses

Charlotte Seither composed Schwebende Verse for percussion and piano for the Phace Contemporary Ensemble, Vienna. “A metal sheet is bent into a loop shape with a rubber mallet, so that fundamental-note sounds result which generate a kind of superordinated metre, like an articulated song. In this piece, I concentrate my material on soft, warm, noisy, spectral, metallic lines, to which sounds from the piano are related,” explains the composer. In this process, the piano functions as a second percussion instrument. Since the tonal results of the metal sheet are unpredictable, this piece is concerned in a special way about “a level of relationship and communication, and about a higher level of intellectual content in the reduced performing material which the musicians have. The piece is fine, floating, has a type of sound close to electronic music, although everything is produced acoustically. The result is a filigree-like speech articulation as in a metre, in a light, subtle linearity.”

Marie Luise Maintz
(aus [t]akte 2/2012)