In his orchestral works of recent years, composer Miroslav Srnka has further divided the orchestra into its “individual sections” and in particular, has individualised the body of strings, leading ultimately to the creation of a gigantic “superorganism”. In his new concert composition “Is This Us?” two solo horns confront a group of many instruments – an orchestra woven into many individual voices. This confrontation is inspired by a passage from Winter by the Norwegian author Karl-Ove Knausgaard, a reflection on identities: “For we ourselves, we are always who we are, whereas for others who we are is something which gradually emerges, something which arrives and then disappears again. Human beings have a vanishing point, into and out of which they move, a zone in which we move, for other people, from the certain to the uncertain, from the uncertain to the certain. This uncertain person, faceless and characterless, lives in patterns which confines them and supplies the material for statistics.”

Exploring this idea further, the composer focuses on constellations of couples: “As a couple you cannot withdraw from each other behind a vanishing point. On the contrary, with closeness, everything only becomes more certain, and everything which is uncertain outside the couple can at the same time completely disappear. But seen from the outside, a couple can also arrive together in the zone of the uncertain. The vanishing point becomes a question of the point of view. And of intimacy.”

In the process, it is the aspects of the mutual interweaving and merging which particularly interest the composer: “When a pair of identical solo instruments stand in front of the orchestral mass, then who disappears for whom behind a vanishing point in such a tonal nexus? Who lives in patterns for whom? Who becomes so intimate for whom that the zone of the uncertain is no longer possible?”

Srnka’s reflection ultimately has the result that Knausgaard does not write about, “that something surprising, forbidden or violent happens”. Instead of this, the music attempts to formulate new questions: “Where is the vanishing point heading? Does intimacy survive? Do we still recognise ourselves afterwards?”                       

Marie Luise Maintz/Robert Krampe
(from [t]akte 1/2024 – translation: Elizabeth Robinson)