An essay on the shared amidst the different is the starting point for Charlotte Seither for Equal ways of difference, her composition for the tenth anniversary of the elole piano trio. Seither has worked with the ensemble since its founding.

“The idea which gave the title to Equal ways of difference was there from early on: it is about the specific quality of the heterogeneity of these three musicians and their instruments –  instruments which are traditionally blended in trio compositions”, says Charlotte Seither. The composition takes as its theme the counterplay between the concerted creation of sound, the merging in ensemble playing and individuality: the process of the finding of one another. Its subject is a musical language in which the diversity, but also the common, is tangible in space.” At the beginning, small units form which repeatedly lead into a vibrating stillness and then start up again. These are not caesuras, but moments in which the material breaks off, which develop out of the noisiness, generate an irritation and begin again with the broken off material.” Out of this gradually emerges a linearity and a tonal silhouette receding further and further into harmonics. The string instruments are stripped of their warm wooden resonance, and at the same time the concentration on pitches is increasingly abandoned until the music leads into a “breathing, pulsing, floating space”.

“At the end the piece becomes very reduced, but is tonally subtler. The space of the piano trio becomes more and more idealised, the instruments sound more abstract in a pulling motion, their identification is finally abandoned, and the sound more and more strongly fractalised.” The form of the 12-minute composition corresponds with the decay curve of a note. The funnel-shaped development and the linearity aim at that utopia which Charlotte Seither has increasingly taken as the theme of her latest compositions: a distant horizon which the form strives for, but never reaches.

Charlotte Seither’s More reasons for reality (2011) for bass flute, bass clarinet, violin, cello and piano was commissioned by the E-Mex ensemble Dortmund. It is, the composer says, “dominated by the bass clarinet, which always proceeds in a horizontal linear direction, roughened by disaltered chords. Through the elements of sound effects and harmonics which result from the disaltered chords, a floating, microscopically differentiated space results which the other instruments fit into linearly, breaking through it in turn and gently turning it in another direction. Dark, softly frayed sounds, as the bass flute or bass clarinet can create, dominate, into which the strings are similarly woven in linear fashion. The piano is released from its supporting harmonic role in this piece and acts as a multiphonic instrument. The reality, the brittleness of the sounds is clarified and is interpreted as part of a flowing system.” The composition will be premiered on 21 October as part of the “Mit den Augen hören” project at the Museum Folkwang, Essen.

Marie Luise Maintz
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson)
from [t]akte 2/2011